Hi all,

I moved into a new house and, of course, have ran into a number of issues. The other night during heavy usage, power to the oven went out. The box revealed no tripped breakers. Multimeter is showing no power at the plug but does show 120V at every terminal except one of the unused nodes third from the bottom on the right. Voilà! Right? Well, maybe not. Truth be told, I can’t figure out which of these actually controls the oven. From what I can tell, it certainly isn’t wired to code since the only 2 pole breaker in the box is running to the dryer. The questionable breaker has one black wire headed down below the box, but not the other red one I’d expect to find since there’s one coming from the plug at the other end. Time to give it up and call the electrician or do you folks have any insight? Panel pictured

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The oven will be a double pole. Looks like it is probably the top left one with the green handles. Measure across the two terminals. You should get 240 volts.

 

Can confirm that the top left belongs to the dryer.

 

You've got problems with this panel. You've got what looks like MWBC (multi wire branch circuits) connected to twin breakers. That would mean the red and black wires are on the same power leg. Very bad on the neutral. Can double the amount of current on the neutral.

 

It’s unfortunately sounding more and more like an electrician is the answer here. The box looks fairly clean but after limited research and your much appreciated help, the breakers look like a lot of guesswork done by whoever did it.

 

I should have explained a little better. A MWBC uses three wires...... red, black and white.... to create two circuits. The neutral is shared between the two hot wires. That means red must go to one leg of power and black must go to the other leg. That would give you 240v across the red and black wires. If you measure across yours.... you'll get 0v as they are on the same leg.

 

Is there a chance the person who wired it used red wires in applications where they shouldn’t have? I recall each of those wires next to each other labeled as different devices they were powering. There’s a chance the labels are all wrong too, of course.

 

If the black and red wires are part of the same cable/conduit then they need to be on different legs in the panel as they are multi-wire circuits.

Is it possible there is another panel in/on the house? Perhaps outside near the meter? The grounds and neutrals are all separated which leads me to believe that this is a sub-panel.

 

I thought the left side was combined but it looks like two bars on that side too,.

 

Hi, to verify those Red and Black conductors are on the same leg, follow them up to the top of panel and see if the are in the same cable.
Geo

 

It is possible that the black and red could be from different cables. If so they would not overload the neutral. It would not meet the latest requirements for a common disconnect, but older codes did not call for one unless both landed on the same yoke.

 

Whoever mentioned the second box outside - you were right! There’s a modest box that looked like part of the meter with a handful of breakers, one of which was the tripped stove (correctly wired).

As far as the doubled up blacks and reds, each go to a separate bundle. Whoever mentioned that it could be wired correctly but not quite up to current standards appears correct. Thank you all so much for your help. You’ve saved me quite a bit of money.

 

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