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Electrical Wiring
Name: Bruce
Status: Other
Age: 40s
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
My light bulbs were blowing out very quickly, every two
or three weeks, to be exact. An electrician looked at my wiring and told
me that my switches were wired incorrectly, that the switch was on the
"neutral" instead of the "hot" wire. He rewired all of my switches and
now my light bulbs don't blow out as quickly.
Why does switching the neutral make light bulbs blow out so quickly?
Replies:
I don't know of any way this particular wiring error can have any
effect on bulb life. However, if your switches were wired incorrectly,
there's a good chance other things were also wrong--things an
electrician looking for the cause of this problem would have checked
and fixed as a matter of course. (You have to understand that an
electrician is going to want to fix everything he sees that's wrong and
that might be the cause of your problem, because he doesn't want you to
have to call him back, and because he can't wait three weeks to see
which fix actually solved the problem. And any electrician who sees a
switch wired backwards is going to fix it whether or not he thinks it
might be the cause of the problem, because electricians just hate it
when customers die while changing light bulbs.)
Anyway, here's one wiring problem that might have been the cause: A
neutral wire disconnected at the breaker box will change a pair of 110
volt circuits into a single 220 volt circuit with appliances from one
circuit electrically in series with appliances from the other. In this
case, if appliances from both circuits were on at the same time, the
actual voltage across them would depend on their resistances, and this
could easily result in more than 110 volts being across your light
bulbs, which would decrease their lifetime significantly. A neutral
wire only loosely connected at the breaker box can have a similar but
less noticeable effect. Anyone who notices a loose neutral connection
is going to tighten it up and give all the other ones a little twist as
well just to be safe. Maybe one of these twists actually is what fixed
the problem.
Tim Mooney
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Update: June 2012
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