Spent three hours tracing a phantom voltage in a crawlspace because of a hidden doorbell transformer.

Got called out to a house in Bellingham for a flickering light in the living room. Customer said it only happened at night. Checked the obvious stuff, swapped the switch, no change. Voltage readings were all over the place. Finally, after crawling around for what felt like forever, I found the issue. The old doorbell transformer from a 1970s system was still wired in behind some insulation, and its secondary was shorting intermittently against a nail. The nail was touching a cold water pipe, creating a weird ground path that only showed up when the humidity rose at night. Pulled that transformer out and the flickering stopped immediately. Has anyone else ever had a random old component cause a headache like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

amy_murphy157d ago

I mean, that's the worst kind of find. Those old hidden transformers are such a pain. Idk why they never just took them out when they stopped using the system. It makes total sense that the humidity at night would trigger it, but tracking that down had to be miserable. Good on you for sticking with it, a lot of people would have just called it a bad neutral and left.

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jesse9887d ago

Ugh, that's SO true. But what really gets me is the safety side of just leaving that junk in the wall. Like, okay it's a pain for us to find, but what if a homeowner drills into it someday? That old wiring isn't getting any younger, and it's just a hidden problem waiting for someone who doesn't even know it's there. Makes the whole "out of sight, out of mind" thing pretty irresponsible.