Half my kitchen where the stove is and half a bedroom are on the same two breakers 15/(15) and a 40/30/30/(40).. one of the breakers as been replaced (15/15) but nothing works unless I turn the stove on and even then the lights twitch and the stove doesn’t get very hot.. what could be the problem??
2 Answers
"Half the house didn't have power" you still have that problem.
When half the house loses power, all of your breakers are OK. The problem is somewhere else. It doesn't sound like you've done anything at all to cure that problem.
Usually, the problem is up at the pole -- the service drop from the power company is whipping in the wind, and one of the hot wires gets fatigued and breaks. And usually, the power company fixes that for free.
Anyway, it's easy to "fool yourself" into thinking circuits are working again, simply by turning on a 240V load. The power will flow through the 240V load and light up the dead phase. This will make appliances seem to come back (but it'll be pretty marginal).
The way to test for this is turn off every single 240V load. It helps to understand what a 240V breaker looks like. It helps even more to understand how panels are laid out. If turning off all your 240V breakers makes half the house go dead again, then the original problem remains.
You can actually get into more trouble by replacing breakers with the wrong brand. Any given panel is only legal/safe with certain specific circuit breakers. Among the lines of 1" breakers, all of them will "seem to" interchange, and it is easy to put the wrong breaker in the wrong panel. However, they don't work properly when you do that, and they can damage the panel buses and even start a fire.
- 313,471
- 28
- 298
- 772