A hot wire buried in the yard that you cannot even trip a breaker by sharting it?

BJLower

Friends have an older home that's been added onto twice. In the yard they dug up a live wire. You can take a screwdriver and carefully short this wire all you want and it stays hot.


This house does not have a main breaker on the outside of the house.


Even getting at the fuse panel in a nightmare, but the only thing I can think of is that during one of the add-ons someone hooked this wire up behind the fuses without using a fuse and the reason you can't get a breaker to trip shorting the line.


Am I going to have to work my way back to the fuse panel and find the un-fused wire?


Any other ideas where this mystery hot wire that won't die might be coming from?

Billy_Bob

Your friend needs to hire an electrician for this as working with live electricity is EXTREMELY dangerous.

If that were my house, I would have the electric company disconnect the electricity first before doing that sort of work. Why? Because I have an option to do that work in a safe manner. There is no need to work with live electricity in a home.

Grampa Bud

If you have a single HOT wire direct buried you would have to bring a good nuetral out to it to short it out. If you have a direct burial PAIR in the ground then you may have an open neutral somewhere in the run. Have you checked the voltage on a VOM or DVM? It could be induced voltage on the wire caused by a long run of wires laid parrellel to each other.

vsheetz

Have you isolated where the power is coming from - in the panel or which breaker? Is there power there with the main breaker turned off? Then you know it's before or after the main breaker. Is there then power there with any one breaker turned off?