I mostly work residential in a gentrifying city -meaning lots of old panels & meters, loose bugs, crappy grounding. I get a lot of situations where 1 leg of the service entrance isn't working/intermittent arcing.
I'm looking for recommendations to get a
voltage logger to see if problems are in the service or past the panel in the house. I'd love something as simple as clamps that I could attach before or after the meter, or in the panel at the main breaker or to a DP breaker that I instal. I could leave it there for a day or two and see what kind of info I get.
For example:
Recently I got called for "flickering lights all over the house". I look at the relatively new panel, an old meter socket and decide to check the bugs on the aerial service. Sure enough, I find under-sized bugs and pock-marks on the POCO's wires and the SE cable that feeds the house so I redo all 3 bugs.
While I'm getting my check, the kitchen lights flicker -but it doesn't look like arcing, it looks like cycling. I check the dimmers and sure enough, it's a incandescent dimmer on a bank of LEDs (I should mention that I am the 3rd electrician they've called and at least one other guy checked the dimmers, so that's just friggin' sad).
My customer calls that night: changing the dimmer helped, but it's still flickering. They also say that the receptacles in the living room (different circuit) went out for about 30 seconds and their projector reset itself.
Now I'm back to thinking it's a service leg ...so it's the meter or the meter socket...or the POCO.
This is where I'd like to have a diagnostic tool so that I don't have to climb up and disconnect the nice new job I did on the bugs just so I can safely examine/clean the meter socket. Frankly, I don't have the time to redo the service any time soon so this is a pain in ma butt
Anybody got suggestions for an inexpensive logger? Maybe something else?