Spent three days tracing a phantom voltage in a 1970s house

Got called out to a split-level in Springfield for lights flickering in one room. Checked the panel, all connections seemed tight. Started pulling outlets and found a backstabbed neutral that had worked loose behind drywall. That should have been it, right? But the flickering kept happening. Ended up finding a junction box in the attic that someone had buried under insulation. The tape on a wire nut had failed and the bare copper was just barely touching a gas line. From the initial call to finally fixing that hidden fault, it took me a solid 12 hours over three visits. The homeowner thought I was making it up until I showed them the scorch mark on the pipe. Ever had a job where the obvious fix was just the start of the real problem?

3 comments

3 Comments

seanh911mo ago

Come on, that's just bad workmanship. A real pro would have found that buried box on the first visit with a proper thermal camera scan. Spending 12 hours over three trips is just billing extra hours. Most of these "mystery" faults are because guys don't do a full system check from the start. They chase the easy thing and call it a day. That scorch mark? Probably from you messing with it, not some hidden fault the homeowner caused.

marymorgan1mo ago

Tell that to my last thermal camera fail, @seanh91.

ruby_lane1mo ago

I just read something from an old trade mag that had a thermal imaging specialist saying you gotta check your emissivity settings before you even start. If you don't set that right you'll see ghost temps everywhere and miss the real problem. Sounds like that could be what happened with your fail. Not saying the guy is wrong about bad workmanship but sometimes it's just a settings issue, not someone phoning it in.