TIL a bad ground wire made me waste 5 hours on a install

I was putting in a new panel at a house in Arlington last week and the keypad kept flickering randomly. Dug into the wiring for 4 hours checking every damn connection before I realized the ground screw on the backplate was stripped from the factory. Swapped the panel and it worked in 10 minutes. Anyone else ever get burned by something this dumb?

2 comments

2 Comments

ninaross1mo ago

Read a guy on another forum say he once fought with a touchscreen thermostat for days before finding out the neutral wire was loose in the breaker box from the factory, same kind of deal.

emmafisher1mo agoMost Upvoted

Same kind of deal" - I gotta push back on that a little. A loose neutral at the breaker box is a whole different animal from bad wiring at the thermostat. One is a main feed issue that can mess up the whole house, the other is just a bad connection on one device. The guy probably spent days pulling his hair out looking at the thermostat when the real problem was way back at the panel. It's not really the same kind of deal, it's more like a broken faucet vs a busted water main. Both cause trouble but one is a lot bigger and harder to spot.