OT: no heat to new dryer

[Mark McM]

Originally Posted by Peter P.

Something similar happened to me recently.

My iMac crapped out, or so it seemed-it was dead but my stereo on the other side of the room worked. I actually bought a new iMac same day and when I got home, things didn't seem right. Long story short, my row of condos lost one leg of the 220V and the way the condos were wired, one side of each condo got 120V and the other half got the other leg.

The utility company had the bad leg replaced by a generator until they could repair the underground wiring fault which took a few days. I returned the iMac to the Apple store; never opened the box, and now I have a better understanding of how houses are wired for AC.

I had an even stranger one. In college, I was renting a beach house with 2 other guys while going to the University of Rhode Island (beach house owners would rent their beach houses for cheap during the winter). One day, when we got back from classes, we discovered that half of all the outlets and lightswitches weren't working. All the breakers were set, so it didn't appear to be a problem with the breakers. As we were going around the house, turning on different different switches to see what was working and what wasn't, the outlets and appliances that weren't working suddenly started working.

This went on for a few days in a row - we'd get home, half of the electrical system wasn't working, and then after testing out what was or wasn't working, the whole system started working again. But we notices a pattern - the half of the electrical system that wasn't working, would start working again soon after turning on the electric oven.

After a few days of this, we realized there was something seriously weird going on, so we called the utility company, who sent someone out to fix it. He started from outside of the house, and discovered that one of the phases was out. He started checking back to the source, and discovered that the power was okay coming out of the distribution box for our street, but one of the phases wasn't making it to the junction box right in front of our house. He also discovered that there had been some street work in front of the house about 6 months earlier, in which part of the pavement had been dug up.

So, the next day, the utility company sent people out to dig up the underground wiring, and they discovered that one of the wires had been nicked and corroded. As soon as they repaired the wire, everything was working as normal in the house.

So what was going on? To the best of our figuring, the wire that was nicked during the previous street work, and then it slowly corroded away over the next months until it was no longer completing the circuit. But when we turned on the oven, it drew so much current that the heat from the adjacent wires caused all the wires to expand, pushing the ends of the broken wire back together and completing the circuit.