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My lack of A/C electrical experience will show as you read. Thanks for putting up with me. I just can't believe a smaller battery charging transformer can cause a problem like this. Here it goes:
About three hours ago the wife, kid and I noticed some lights flickering. I blamed it on the wind, some folks in St Louis are actually without power because of it.
By two hours ago we had dimming/flickering of lights on two circuits, the heatpump's thermostat turned off and two tv's would not come on.
I got my handyman neighbor and my multi meter and went downstairs to see what was going on at the circuit breaker box. The lights on the circuit in the basement with my workshop and box the were dim also.
In a room next to it he noticed buzzing (he called it arcing) coming from an outlet with a transformer which charges my house alarm plugged into it.
He tapped the alarm transformer and the lights flickered in the other room. I unplugged it and everything went back to normal. I used the multi meter to test power to the outlet and it showed a steady 120.6. After turning on every light in the house and letting the heatpump come back on everything seemed to be working so we plugged back in the transformer. About ten minutes go by and the lights upstairs start flickering. Same tap test makes the lights flicker downstairs and unplugging it allows everything to work just fine.
The transformer is a UB1640W. Google shows it on Amazon for CHEAP. Unlike most of my A/C to D/C transformers I see it seems to turn 120VAC to 16.5 VAC @ 40VA. When I unplugged its output and just plugged it into a different outlet with no load on the transformer nothing went wrong. My meter showed 18.5 VAC output not under load.
I can accept the $10 transformer has gone bad, what could it be doing to mess with at least three different circuits in my house?
As a side note, I had a similar thing happen a couple months ago where the A/C circuit and garage door went dead. After switching around wires and making the garage and heater work we determined the center part of the copper contact strip which lined up with the A/C and garage circuits did not have 120 V of power. After a few moments of scratching our heads we put the circuit breakers back in and viola everything worked.
A/C current confuses me. Is it possible for this transformer to really be causing all this trouble? No circuit breakers tripped either time.
Thanks again for putting up with me.
About three hours ago the wife, kid and I noticed some lights flickering. I blamed it on the wind, some folks in St Louis are actually without power because of it.
By two hours ago we had dimming/flickering of lights on two circuits, the heatpump's thermostat turned off and two tv's would not come on.
I got my handyman neighbor and my multi meter and went downstairs to see what was going on at the circuit breaker box. The lights on the circuit in the basement with my workshop and box the were dim also.
In a room next to it he noticed buzzing (he called it arcing) coming from an outlet with a transformer which charges my house alarm plugged into it.
He tapped the alarm transformer and the lights flickered in the other room. I unplugged it and everything went back to normal. I used the multi meter to test power to the outlet and it showed a steady 120.6. After turning on every light in the house and letting the heatpump come back on everything seemed to be working so we plugged back in the transformer. About ten minutes go by and the lights upstairs start flickering. Same tap test makes the lights flicker downstairs and unplugging it allows everything to work just fine.
The transformer is a UB1640W. Google shows it on Amazon for CHEAP. Unlike most of my A/C to D/C transformers I see it seems to turn 120VAC to 16.5 VAC @ 40VA. When I unplugged its output and just plugged it into a different outlet with no load on the transformer nothing went wrong. My meter showed 18.5 VAC output not under load.
I can accept the $10 transformer has gone bad, what could it be doing to mess with at least three different circuits in my house?
As a side note, I had a similar thing happen a couple months ago where the A/C circuit and garage door went dead. After switching around wires and making the garage and heater work we determined the center part of the copper contact strip which lined up with the A/C and garage circuits did not have 120 V of power. After a few moments of scratching our heads we put the circuit breakers back in and viola everything worked.
A/C current confuses me. Is it possible for this transformer to really be causing all this trouble? No circuit breakers tripped either time.
Thanks again for putting up with me.
