is it normal for my main circuit breaker to be hot
if you're not an electrician make sure you hire an electrician because they
have all of the equipment and they can properly diagnose something like that
all right this was a good question it was sent in by victor tanchiongwe
on the types of circuit breakers and how they work video so uh victor asks is it normal for main
circuit breaker to be a little hot at times mine once in a while trip i don't think my appliance
is shorted as it could be reset i think maybe it's too old my house is 25 year olds thank you
um that's actually a really good question so a lot of older homes you'll notice um some breakers are
hot and it might not be every breaker it might be just the main breaker which is the one at the top
once you start noticing that there's weird things going on with circuits and you start seeing things
trip often or you see some flickering happening there's a few different things that you can tell
to diagnose whether a breaker is just failing or going bad the fact that it's 25 years old if the
panel and all the breakers are new but the house is 25 years old it may not be that it's getting
old it may be that an appliance is starting to fail it could be like a motorized appliance or
something like that motors are designed to spin quickly at whatever their nameplate rating is and
so if a motor doesn't have enough grease and it's getting dried up or bearings going out or there's
just gunk inside of it it's going to spin a lot slower and there's a weird thing with motors once
they start spinning slower than they're designed to spend or they're bound up and they're not able
to spin very quickly they start drawing a lot more current and so it could just be an issue of the
breakers heating up because there's more current going through it than there's supposed to be
it could be you know that you have small wire and you have an appliance that's going out and
so that that that the point at which that heat is experienced is going to be in that breaker not all
the time but that is one thing that could happen sometimes breakers will run at their rated current
so a 30 amp breaker might run at 30 amps it might run at 31 32 33 because breakers are only designed
to trip at 130 percent of their rating and that's usually over a long term over current situation so
there are there's a thermal mechanism on the inside of them that allows them to trip
but it has to build up heat for that little bi-metallic strip to start bending from the heat
to separate for the breaker to trip so a breaker might run just slightly above what it's supposed
to be at its hundred percent value might be running at 120 percent and it's not going
to trip so it might be hot just because of that because you get so much of a load on it
one it could just be yes that it's old a lot of old breakers you know these are just mechanical
things they just have little pieces of metal and springs and little levers and stuff inside of them
so over time that stuff starts to get weak it's exposed to elements a lot of panels are on the
outsides of homes so just moisture and drying out moisture over time can get inside of these metal
bits can cause things to not want to function as properly things can rust out and get corroded on
the inside or you know just a constant exposure to moisture if you have electrical issues and you
have breakers that are constantly tripping to your cycling something over and over and over so the
little bits inside of it you know moving over time just reoccurring over time are going to weaken it
there's going to be some kind of end of life eventually to all of these mechanical parts
so um yeah i would say the best thing to do is to test that breaker out you know get your
multimeter out first and foremost just check the current on it you know if you have an ammeter
or some kind of multimeter where you can check the amperage i have a clamp on ammeter
that i can clamp around the conductors to see how much current is going through them
and it's really important to check both of the hots that are coming into this breaker or if it's
three phase check all three hots say it's a 200 amp breaker if you have one of those hots that's
got like 180 amps and one of them's got like 60 amps there's an issue there right like there's an
imbalance in that system and so you probably have weird numbers on your neutral as well
you have a lot more current on the neutral than you should because you have such a high imbalance
in the system but like weird things like that can cause heating because it's just a lot of heat
going through a lot of current you know current traveling through a conductor generates heat
and that heat escapes um there's a heat loss and so when you feel something hot it could be
something like that where there's just a high amount of current um if there's not if you're
like a 200 amp breaker and there's like 40 amps of current and everything seems equally balanced and
there's no issue then i would start to investigate whether or not that that breaker is failing
it could be a good breaker it might not actually be failing but there could be bad connections to
the breaker that's another thing that creates a lot of heating issues so out in the field we
have specific torque settings that when we you know tighten conductors down to lugs we need to
make sure that the torque settings are set to a certain amount to make sure that the actual bolt
or lug is squishing down on those wires and is solid and there's no movement in those conductors
because if there's any kind of movement or looseness it can create arcing and arcing is a
really really high resistance point where there's just a bad connection so you can actually generate
an insane amount of heat at these points usually in that situation you're going to start noticing
a little bit of like melting or charring um some some like obvious visual signs of like
heat on that one conductor um i've had jobs where somebody just forgot to put uh you know like screw
the lug in and then they generate or they turn on the power and there's still a connection being
made but it's a really loose one but you'll start to notice that over time if you were to open it up
and there's power running through those conductors they'll start glowing red hot because it's not a
tight termination so you're not maximizing all of the surface area for all of that current to
go through all of the current is trying to go through just a small portion of that wire
that's making contact so that's a way that heating can occur another thing is that you could have a
bus that's been damaged so there's not really a good connection from the bus to the breaker
you might have some lugs a lot of times especially specifically with the the square d
qo stuff that we use you can put a breaker kit in a main lug panel so breakers are either
panels are either main breaker or main lug main breaker usually comes with a breaker but main lug
does not have a main breaker in it because it's meant to be able to use as a sub panel somewhere
but a lot of people will take breaker kits and they'll take these nuts out that are on
these studs and when you take the nuts off you can actually take a breaker kit and slam
the breaker kit in and re-secure it so you can turn a main lug panel into a main breaker panel
and again at a point where somebody should have torqued something and made sure that it's tight
you could just have a nut that's coming loose or something like that so that breaker
the plates where the breaker attaches or like makes contact with the bus bars inside of that
panel there could be a little bit of looseness there which creates heating and all of that
heating can translate up into the breaker and you might feel something hot you could have harmonics
issues this is probably a house so i doubt you're having like severe heating due to harmonics issues
that's a whole different topic but those are just some of the things that might be creating the heat
if you want to test a breaker i think it's a good idea you know to inspect a breaker actually
you know try to simulate a situation where it should trip if you've got
a 30 amp breaker and you've got like 50 amps worth of current going through it you're testing it and
it's not tripping that thing's bad if sometimes it trips and sometimes it doesn't and the load is
not changing in any way you can tell okay there's an inconsistency in how this breaker is operating
sometimes there's a problem sometimes there's not you do have to be careful with that though
because sometimes the situation in the building or the house somebody's got like something else
turned on all of a sudden that's you know sharing part of a circuit or it's on the same circuit
and so it's not going to act the same and then when they go shut that off you're still sitting
out there like oh wait now it's all of a sudden working but the conditions of the loads and the
circuit has changed so trying to like isolate as many variables as possible and see how something
acts you know rather consistently is a good idea but if that thing is kind of failing over time
but it's working over and it's hot there's definitely something that you should check out
and a really good thing to do is to check with a known good breaker so a lot of times if i have
like maybe not a main breaker you're probably not just carrying around 200 amp main like sitting in
the back of your van actually i am i think i have like a 150 at 200 and 225 right now i keep so much
crap in my van that's so much it's stupid um but a lot of times if it's just like a 20 amp breaker or
something like that i have a bunch of breakers for all different brands and stuff so a lot of times
i'll go out to my van if i think a breaker is bad rather than trying to set up this whole experiment
to test conditions at 130 percent and 200 percent i'll just go get a good breaker and i'll swap
it out put that good breaker in there and then re-test and if nothing happens and it stays good
you know it's 99 sure that the breaker was the issue another quicker way to do that if you don't
just have other breakers is use a nearby breaker so you know shut shut the nearby breaker off take
the wire out put the original circuit that you were having an issue on on that other breaker
that's not having a problem and flip it on and just see how it works and then if it still kind
of does the crazy thing then you probably have something faulty with the load or the actual
thing that's hooked up at the other end of the circuit um because when things start to fail when
devices were when equipment starts to fail a lot of times it doesn't do it consistently a lot of
times there's like some weird situation within the equipment that shows up but then it just kind of
goes away and everything acts normal and then when it's starting to fail again you'll notice this
weird thing showing up so i hope that answered your question rambled a lot but i hope it gave
some value to you at least so you could help try to diagnose this if you're not an electrician make
sure you hire an electrician because they have all of the equipment and they can properly diagnose
something like that by the way i have some breaker videos if you're more curious to like how breakers
work and stuff like that check this video this is actually the video that the comment was from
if you want to know how ground fault dual function arc fault breakers work click this video there's
pretty good information in there as well love you crazy people and i'll see you in the next one