Just wasted 3 days chasing a ghost on a hardwired motion sensor install

Turns out the transformer I swapped in had a faulty ground that was causing intermittent power drops only at certain times of night. Anyone else run into a similar gremlin that took way longer to track down than it should have?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric3596d ago

Wait, are you sure it was a faulty ground on the transformer and not something like a bad neutral connection somewhere else in the circuit? I had a similar headache once with a floodlight that would drop out around 3 AM every night, and it turned out to be a loose screw on the neutral bus bar in the panel that only acted up when the house's electric heater kicked on and pulled more current. The transformer ground can do some weird stuff for sure, but intermittent drops at specific times make me wonder if you checked the load side of the circuit too, maybe a sagging voltage when the fridge compressor kicks in. Those ghost problems are the worst, especially when you're swapping parts and the real fix is a $0.50 screw tighten job.

oscarwilliams6d ago

Honestly, my buddy Matt spent a whole weekend swapping out a thermostat on his AC because the damn thing would short cycle only when it was like 68 degrees out. Turned out a spider had built a nest inside the contactor and it only acted up at that exact temp when the coil pulled in just right.