wiring from street into home

[Lisa]

Good morning! We have a Fleetwood double wide mobile home purchased brand new in 1999.
We have been having air conditioning problems from day 1. So last night we were outside and took the cover off of the access panel on the heat pump unit. Well...it touched something which we believe was the power wire to the fan. It sparked. And now the unit does not run at all. He has a volt meter and with the advice of his friend (who does AC work, but lives cross country from us), he checked the power coming out of the disconnect box mounted on the outside of the home. There was NO power going from that box to the heat pump unit. We went into the fuse box, nothing was tripped and everything in the house had power (checked with meter).

My question is...are there any other fuses or breakers this could have tripped? There is no power coming from the disconnect box. On the side of the home by the ground there is a sticker that says something like this connection is ???/???. Does that mean that there is a breaker or a connection under the house that could have tripped? We're at a loss.

Any info you could give us would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Lisa

[Tom]

As a retired licensed residential electrician in North Carolina, I would recommend you call either an HVAC service person or an electrician. (Unless you folks feel experienced enough to continue to check this problem out.) There are many ways to get zapped if you are not careful.

Without being on site it is difficult to know what this problem may be. If the outside disconnect box has cartridge fuses, it is possible one of these has blown and needs to be replaced. There will be no physical sign they have blown. (Some disconnects have these, others have copper strips which melt when overloaded.)

(Use EXTREME caution when doing the folloqing;) You can check this out at the disconnect box by using your meter. Put one test lead on the bottom lug of the disconnect and the other lug on either the ground (bare copper ) bar or neutral (white wire) bar. You should read 110 volts. Repeat for the second lug, and if you have no 110 reading on that lug, then the cartridge fuse has blown. Be sure your hands do not touch any of the lugs in the disconnect. Use only the insulated leads of the meter to touch the lugs.

Before starting up the unit again, you need to find out why the fan? lead arced. This is something for the HVAC service person.

[Tom]

As a retired licensed residential electrician in North Carolina, I would recommend you call either an HVAC service person or an electrician. (Unless you folks feel experienced enough to continue to check this problem out.) There are many ways to get zapped if you are not careful.

Without being on site it is difficult to know what this problem may be. If the outside disconnect box has cartridge fuses, it is possible one of these has blown and needs to be replaced. There will be no physical sign they have blown. (Some disconnects have these, others have copper strips which melt when overloaded.)

(Use EXTREME caution when doing the folloqing;) You can check this out at the disconnect box by using your meter. Put one test lead on the bottom lug of the disconnect and the other lug on either the ground (bare copper ) bar or neutral (white wire) bar. You should read 110 volts. Repeat for the second lug, and if you have no 110 reading on that lug, then the cartridge fuse has blown. Be sure your hands do not touch any of the lugs in the disconnect. Use only the insulated leads of the meter to touch the lugs.

Before starting up the unit again, you need to find out why the fan? lead arced. This is something for the HVAC service person.

[Lisa]

Thank you for the information. It was very helpful. Our disconnect box has a thing that you pull out and it is copper strips. Kind of looks like fat fork ends (best description I can come up with, lol) Can we get that from our HVAC guy? Or an electrical supply store?

Don't you worry about the extreme caution....I'm all for safety!! I will print this off for him and only if he feels comfortable doing that, we'll check it. I have no problems at all calling someone if he doesn't feel comfortable doing it.

I'm thinking the fan lead arced because when he took off the panel cover, I think it touched the metal connector on the fan wire. So who knows what other repairs we will have to deal with once we figure out the electricty issue. We have an extra control board already (long story). May have killed the fan motor itself with having touched it like that. We'll just have to see.

Thank you again for your help!

Lisa

[Danny]

Lisa,
In some cases the circuit may be ran from the outside panel, rather than from the inside panel, and there may be another breaker there. in any case when you find the breker designated for the hvac turn it all way off and then back on...and recheck with a meter.
good luck!

[Tom]

Danny is right. Often times there are two main service panels (one outside and one inside), though normally, they run the AC from the inside panel, but as he says, check your outside panel, if you have one.

You can get a new pull out disconnect at your local "big box" home supply house.