The Tuesday that made me double check every panel I've ever wired

Had a callback last month at a house in Madison. Customer said their alarm was going off randomly at 2am every other night. I figured it was a bad PIR or maybe a loose connection. Took me 3 hours to find it. Someone had left a tiny piece of metal shavings from the drill in the panel box. It was barely visible but it was bridging two terminals. After I cleaned it out, system worked perfect. Made me think about all the jobs where I might have left little bits of debris behind. Has anyone else found weird stuff causing phantom issues like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

joseph_green131d agoMost Upvoted

One time I found a dead spider wedged between two relay contacts in a panel. It must have crawled in there and got zapped, but its little crispy body was still conducting just enough to cause intermittent shorts. Took me forever to find because who thinks to look for bug guts?

henry15021h ago

@joseph_green13 Oh man, that EXACT thing happened to me but with a moth. I had this one panel at a warehouse that would randomly trip a breaker every few days. Checked everything, wiring looked clean, nothing seemed loose. Finally I pulled the contactor apart and found a toasted moth wing just barely touching both terminals. Little crispy piece of bug was causing enough resistance to heat things up but not enough to pop the breaker right away. Drove me NUTS for two weeks before I found it.

mason_murray819h ago

Pulled open a junction box once on a job and found a whole family of ants had built a nest in there. They werent causing a direct short but their little ant bodies were building up between the wire nuts and creating enough cross talk to mess with a sensitive PLC input. Spent three days chasing phantom faults before I cracked that box open and saw them all scatter. It was like something out of a horror movie when I popped the cover off and saw them pouring out. My foreman still gives me crap about being the guy who got beat by ants.