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?

2 comments

2 Comments

seanh917d 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.

marymorgan6d ago

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