150amp hum.....help!....NOW FIXED and working

[KMS]

I wonder if any body else has had this problem?

The only place I get hum is in my basement..................this has been avoidable until now.

I have issues that now put my practicing in the basement and the hum is real bad.

I have isolated what the problem is.........

The ground for the house electric service is connected to the water pipe and when I disconnect the ground from the water pipe the hum is gone 100%.

The water pipe runs loops throught the basement...in and around everthing.

But when I dissconnect the ground from the water pipe,all my lights flicker....and the blower on my furnace does not work.

I installed and external ground rod and it made no difference....but the rod is drove into the house foundation backfill (50 years old) and I primarily drove it through stones (what a pain in the ass that was!).

Any ideas?....it is a 60hz hum.

Could I be needing a better earth material for a ground?

Does anyone know if there is a way to rectify the ground to get rid of the 60hz signal on my pipes?  A big capacitor and a diode?  If so, how large C and what kind of diode?

Any suggestions are welcome...any at all.

[R.G.]

OK, this is serious. Not the hum part, the lights and flickering part. Fortunately you've already figured out about 90% of the problem.

Your house has an electrical wiring problem, which you've figured out. It's related to the electrical distribution in the basement, and it appears to be a floating or high resistance neutral line from your description. The right thing to do is to call an electrician and fix the house. It could be as simple as a loose/corroded wire in the distribution box, or as complicated as rewiring the basement. No way to tell.

High resistance neutrals are a bona fide safety problem; possible outcomes are (a) hum, which you have, (b) electrical shocks, (c) electrocution, especially in a high-humidity basement, and (d) house fires.

Get a licensed electrician to check it out. This is not a DIY problem. In most states, if you mess about with the wiring and subsequently a house fire is shown to have been caused by electrical problems, insurance companies will refuse to pay the claim.

[KMS]

You know....I think your right R.G. !!

Now that you bring up the flickering issue as a problem......I have noticed the lights flickering occasionally for apparently no reason.  For example, out in the garage late at night the lights flicker not just a simple flicker though....usually get brighter for about 1/2 second  and then dim and back to normal...all in the course of about 1 second.  Some times it will happen two or three times in a row.  There is nothing else on that circuit breaker except the garage utilities and the problem happens with no load other than three 100watt light bulbs.

I have seen the same flickering on other circuits in the house too.

I always excused it as a Electric Company problem.

Also when a heavy load is put on a circuit just about any where in the house the same thing happens...but I have always excused the flickering in those cases as normal.

I get no hum on my equipment out in the garage. Also no hum if I play the guitar in the basement with the pickups positioned at just the right angle or play the guitar on the south side of the house (even in the basement) with the south side of the house furthest away from the water pipe service to the street and also furthest away from the duct work which is probably touching the water pipes at one point or two. However there is not an ergonomic location to play music on the south side of the house.

I know that you are right R.G. about the electrician issue....and thanks for those anti-DIY tips.

But the real problem here is finding a good electrician, that will do the job right. 

About 15 years ago the City of Ellisville, MO offered a home improvement gift for those needy folks that qualified.  Depending on the value of your home and your income you could get as much as $15,000 of improvement paid for by the city and if you stayed in the house over five years after the work was completed then you didn't owe the city a dime.  I qualified for $7500 worth of improvement in 1989 but the "deal" had a catch where the city inspected the house and the first part of the $7500 was to bring the house up to current building code standards for which my house needed $1200 of electrical work to pass inspection.  So the city hired their own electrician to wire my house and this problem is at most the result of that wiring job or at least the electricians neglect to find the this problem years ago......but now it passes inspection.

So if I leave it up to the pros....they will kill me, my wife, and my two sons (and maybe my dog too).  Also, I have been shocked in the shower very small amount of tinkle through a cut in my toe when I put my foot on the drain grate. I believe I do have a serious problem but how will I ever convince an electrician to do the job right? I have had two other electricians do work on the house too....hook the stove up and also hook up a whirlpool tub.

I really do believe that only a DIY application will solve this problem and if it is done correctly then there will be no fire and thus no reason to worry about insurance claims.

So it looks like I will have to find the problem myself and fix it.   A loose connection ?  I know where there are some potential loose connections in the neutral wire.....one is on the service line where the neutral wire was cut in half by grounding out on a pine tree many years ago (just a guess... I don't really know why it was cut in half) and I spliced it together with a wire clamp. Also the service line problem was present at the time of the city's inspection and they knew the neutral on the service was burnt in half and said that it was not their problem to inspect the service outside of the the connection at the house.

What is puzzling is how in the hell anything worked while the neutral line was burnt in half and I have no idea how long it was like that up in that thick pine tree....I just happened to see it one day while I was trimming the limbs about ten years ago.  I think I will solder the connection at the clamp....with a torch and some acid flux.  Next I will check each neutral lug inside the service box.......don't worry I can do this and not kill myself.... I have all the equipment and I am in no hurry.

Then I will add two grounding 10ft long Cu electrodes out away from the foundation and separate them by at least 10ft and I will not drive them into the rock below rather I will install them about 18 inches below the ground line laying horizontally to make sure they are in earth rather than rocks. Then join it all together with some No. 4 solid Cu wire and soak it in with water and mild fertilizer.

I have no idea if this will work or not, but I damn sure that no electrician will ever do what I just explained  and it does need to be done even if I do get a whole new service box this still needs to be done.

Thanks R.G. for some very good advice and tips and thanks for helping jog my memory giving me a change to re-cap the electrical history of my house.....If it was not for you saying," You have a serious problem" I would have never thought that I did and it all makes sense now.  I know that you advised me to get professional help and I am not ignoring your advise....I just don't have access to a quality electrical contractor.

[R.G.]

I have seen the same flickering on other circuits in the house too.

Here's the scary part - if you happen to have aluminum wiring, that flickering could be corresponding to an arc in whatever conductor is not conducting well. That arc can and has started house fires. That's why aluminum wiring is no longer allowed for house wiring.

Also, I have been shocked in the shower very small amount of tinkle through a cut in my toe when I put my foot on the drain grate.

Wow... that's got to be from the grounding current running through the cold water pipes. I've never heard of one that bad before. You're actually getting the difference between the water spigot cold water supply and the grounded water in the drain. It's small, but with an open cut, it's easy to feel.

A loose connection ?  I know where there are some potential loose connections in the neutral wire.....one is on the service line where the neutral wire was cut in half by grounding out on a pine tree many years ago (just a guess... I don't really know why it was cut in half) and I spliced it together with a wire clamp.
....don't worry I can do this and not kill myself.... I have all the equipment and I am in no hurry.

OK. My prayers are with you.

The problem with neutral line faults is that there are so many neutral line pathways. What *should* be happening is that wherever the transformer serving your house is, the secondary that makes your low voltage (240/120Vac, down from 13KV feed) should have the center tap of the 240Vac grounded at the pole by a copper wire that runs down the pole and is stapled in a spiral to the bottom of the pole. If you have typical service from there, three wires go to your house from the pole: two insulated wires and one uninsulated one. The uninsulated one is the neutral. The two insulated ones are each 120Vac, opposite phase, so that there's 240Vac between the outer two. If the neutral is open or high resistance,, then the difference between what's being used in each 120Vac side flows through the grounding arrangement at your house. This is entirely capable of carrying the current, as the planet is a relatively low resistance conductor, but there can be localized voltage variations. Hence the flickering and toe-tingle.

I would think that your local electrical untilty would be responsible for ensuring the solid connection of neutral from their pole to your service entrance. You might give them a call.

From there, there is usually a ground rod from the main service entrance or main electrical box. Sometimes this is a connection to cold water piping. When I had my last house built, the electricians thought I was crazy, but I had a ground rod on each end of the house as well as a ground rod at the external service entrance.

Please be careful. But do get it fixed!!

[R.G.]

Serendipity, I guess. I went over to ampage and found a discussion on line voltage. Open/high resistance neutrals let the two 120Vac sides get unbalanced.
Drewl says"

As far as the ground thing, I had that in my house a couple years ago. One leg would be about 60v, the other 180v!
I did some research into it and found that they call it a "loose neutral" the power company's fault and extremely dangerous....it could blow up aplliances and start fires.
I called my power company and told them I had a "loose neutral: ...they were at my house replacing the bad meter in 15 minutes!!!!

[KMS]

I have not checked the pole yet...to see if if the transformer is grounded.  I am the last house on a run of poles and the transformer is on my pole so I would hope that Ameren has it grounded...I'll find out.

Good to see you noticed the potential danger with aluminum wiring.  Most people don't know how dangerous it is.  My house is all copper. I have seen the aluminium done before and the electrician uses some kind of dope on each connection and I heard that any future circuit extensions must always be aluminum (with the dope) as to prevent electronic potential differences of dissimilar metals from causing corrosion(decay) where the arc you mentioned will inevitably develop and cause a fire.

My day job....I design water mains for American Water, relocation projects, new developments, etc.  I am an American Water employee.  We recently had several training seminars on cathodic protection (the galvanic style), and the associated electronic decay of dissimilar metals.  Hell....you can even get decay on a stainless steel bolt if it is in the "wrong" type of soil where such soil will show less decay than on a standard steel bolt.  It all depends on the exact field conditions.  I am also currently writing the new American Water specifications for pipeline installation that include protection from electronic corrosion.  The spec will be a living document as I have found out that there is still a lot to be learned in the field of electronic corrosion.

I went to Ameren UE web site today and got the wiring diagram for their spec on house grounding.  The Illinois version is all I could find.  They show two different examples.  One is much like what I described in my last post.  The other...they explicitly show the ground being made to the water pipe where they also show jumper wires bypassing the insulator couplings on the water meter.   Man was I pissed when I saw that!   They are not supposed to do that! The whole reason why we (myself included) design the water meter with insulator couplings is to prevent the electric service from putting an electronic potential on the water main and also on the copper service line.  This causes the service line and the water main (particularly the incorporation valve at the service connection to the main) to decay much more rapidly. So I checked my meter this morning and sure enough it has a No. 4 Cu jumper wire bypassing the meter.   

Back to my private residential problem.......My electric company stops their maintenance at the pole so the service line is my ownership and maintenance.  I guess that means I do what ever I want......he he.... since they do what ever they want.....damn it!

I'll be careful and if I wind in the hospital (alive) I'll see if they have an E-cafe so I can let you all know how it feels to get hit with 150 amps.  I was up in that tree once before and it was no problem......I'll make sure everything in the house is off (cut the main breaker).

I did notice last night when I disconnected the connection at the water pipe an arc that looked to me like about 1 or 2 amp (judging from experience). The blower was on, half the lights in the house and potentially two refrigerators.  Everything else was off so it looks like a lot of the load is going to the water pipe.

I'll keep you posted........cheers and thanks again.

[KMS]

I didn't see the "loose neutral" post.......How would I determine that?  I'm sure that the electric company won't come out and investigate it as they don't do anything until it is too late (smoke rolling is when they see the problem).  In fact they just had a huge disaster that they knew would happen for years an never did anything about it ....Tom Sawk Reservoir in Missouri....the dam was failing for the last 15 years and they knew it would break....it broke two months ago and boy what mess that was.

Did they the method of investigation.....a link to the discussion would help me I'm sure.

[R.G.]

My electric company stops their maintenance at the pole so the service line is my ownership and maintenance.

That was kind of the point - the neutral coming from the pole **is** their responsibility. They owe it to you (and the National Electrical Code) to make sure that the neutral is bonded to ground at the pole. If that big aluminum line is not tied well to both ground and the power transformer at the pole, then the ground (i.e., the planet) is what is carrying all the differential return current. If that wire is open, then many things, all bad, can happen at your end of the wires. If the open is up on the pole, not just the broken and clamped place, then they have a problem if you get electrocuted, and many lawyers would line up to take the case. They may be more interested than you think. I could be wrong, but try calling them.

I didn't see the "loose neutral" post.......How would I determine that?

The post was over on ampage's amps forum, a discussion of what line voltages are these days. One guy put in the post that I quoted. I posted the whole thing, there isn't any more than that. Maybe some internet searching would turn up something. The way to tell is to find places that tap each side of the 240V line. They should both be 120Vac nominal. Then turn on a big load on a single phase. If the neutral is high resistance (i.e. loosely connected), then the phases will be unbalanced because the current in one side will be flowing in the neutral wire. You'll see 120+120 change to maybe 100 and 140. A pistol sized hair dryer is almost a kW, so a couple of them on one phase should let you see a difference.

That's just my guess about how to find it. There are probably better ways since I'm not an electrician.

[KMS]

That hair dryer method sounds doable to me...I'll try it when I finish tracing all the other simpler errors.   A 1500 watt space heater would also work.

I guess your right about the electric company....I checked my triplex service line today and someone has changed my splice out to a real professional looking splice (definitely not my clamps).  I guess they did it when they put the new transformer in about 4 years ago......they also raised my line so it is not touching the tree anymore.

Amazing what goes on around my house that I don't notice until I look real close.  My wife said they told her they were working on something but she forgot all about it.

The transformer and the neutral line are grounded at the pole with No. 6 Cu.  I still question the splice even though it is a real good crimped style coupler.... but it must be tight because it holds the tension and when they raised the line the tension had to be increased.

I still need to check all those lugs inside the box.

[R.G.]

If they worked the lines, chances are it may be a loose connection in the box.

Or maybe it's confined to the circuits in the basement, a loose neutral connection to a few circuits.

I've opened a distribution box before, and lived, but even with all my experience and training, it still scares me. Be careful in there!

[KMS]

Actually it is pretty simple to work on the box if the main breakers are turned off.  I replaced a couple of breakers over the years and have not been too intimidated by the experience ....except when I turn main breakers back on......that's when I squint my eyes even with my goggles on. 

My wife freaks-out when she sees me working inside the service box.

My grandfather is the guy who gets the credit for teaching me these dangerous tricks and I can remember the first time I saw him working on his service (fuse box). I thought he was crazy (maybe he was).  He showed me what can do and what I can't do. What I can't do is touch the live 110 lines which means I can't mess with the main breakers other that turn them on or off.

My sons are home all day today and my wife will be leaving soon...so I'll wait until she is gone and take the cover off the service.  The boys will be here if I make a mistake.

[KMS]

You're a life saver R.G.........literally!

No joke....someone would have potentially been killed by the problems I found today.

I inspected the wiring at the service mast...at the head on top.  I found that the neutral wire from the pole (triplex) is zinc but the neutral wire from the mast head to my service box is braided aluminum.  The clamp at the mast is made of die-cast aluminum.  The braided aluminum wire is corroded to the point of ....obsolete wire.  4 of the aluminum braids are melted in half very close to the clamp but not inside the clamp.  I took it apart and cleaned each braid (one at a time) and cleaned the clamp and cleaned the zinc wire from the triplex. 4 of the aluminum braids broke as soon as I put pressure on them and about 5 others broke while I was cleaning them.  So there are about ¾ of all the braids left that are not broke.  I put it back together (temporarily).  I would have cut the lead shorter and tried to clean another spot off with the full set of braids but I was afraid that I would wind up with more braids broken due to the badly decayed aluminum braids.

I could not shut the service off at the main breakers....because there are no main breakers. I thought I had main breakers but I confused my thoughts with my mother-in-law's house or my sister's house.  So I had to work inside the box while everything was hot.  I found a brass (maybe bronze) clamp in the box that connects the aluminum braided neutral wire from the mast to a braided copper wire that connects to the service box neutral bus bar.  That clamp was barely finger tight. The clamp was also installed with the contact saddle backwards so when I tightened it up to the last threads the wires were still loose.  I took it apart and put the saddle on correctly and tightened it down fairly tight.  The sweat was rolling off my head each turn because I was forced into a no gloves situation working within an inch of one of the Main 110V terminals (so a main breaker would not have help me on that anyway).  I found 4 other neutral lugs in the box that needed tighten too. 

I tested the house with the ground disconnected from the water pipe and got an occasional light flicker (all the lights at once) and a real bad light flicker with the microwave on. I tightened the clamp some more and the flicker was reduced.  I then took a chance and put some real hard pressure on the clamp and got about 2 more turns out it and thus it is as tight as I can make it.  Now no lights flicker at all with everything on including the 220V dryer and the microwave. 

I am worried about that aluminum neutral wire and I am sure it needs to be replaced because eventually it will corrode and start arcing, melt and/or causing an inevitable fire.  I could bypass it with copper until we have the money to replace it.

I dug a couple of ditches yesterday and buried two more electrodes (horizontally) and wired them into the service today.  Made the final connections and now I get no hum from my guitar pickups at all.  No arc when connecting to the nuetral to ground electrodes either. Everything in the house works correctly and my water pipes are no longer part of the circuitry in my house.


You definitely diagnosed my problem R.G. (loose connection....aluminum wire) and now I have a sporting chance of getting an electrician to fix it right.

Thanks for all you do.......your a real life saver!

[R.G.]

Well, crying "wolf!!" is right sometimes 

I'm really glad you found the problem before someone got hurt, and just as importantly that you didn't die trying.

I'm sure there's a specified way to connect zinc or galvanized wire to aluminum, but I don't know what it is. Maybe some of the anti-corrosion gook they use for copper-to-aluminum wiring. Here's where we need a real electrician's experience.

Good work! Congratulations.

[KMS]

Also for anyone else reading this thread.....I no longer get hum even with the neutral hooked to the water pipe...just like R.G. said....the problem was something in my electric service.

The reason why I have chose to hook my neutral to an external ground instead of the water pipe is because it will insure that my water service enjoys a longer lifespan....and it would be unethical for me to use a water pipe for a ground when I am writing a water-main specification for others to follow that explicitly states not to do that.

I think I have discovered something I didn't know...which is....If the electric service is functioning properly then using the water pipe as a ground will not cause the water service to decay (except during a hot to neutral short or lightening strike on the line).

So now I can discuss this from and educated frame of reference.

Imagine that........My day job will benefit from my stompbox building.

Hey!...And now I can tell my wife that due to my stompbox building I have potentially saved her life.

Cheers!