kicking a breaker, with a kicker

[My Old Tools]

Friends house is kicking a breaker. Breaker appears to be lightly loaded with 2 fluorescent lights and a couple of incandescent lights.

The kicker is, the load center/breaker box is on a pole about 40 feet from the house. All the circuits are run with ROMEX, underground in plastic 2"+ conduit to the house. He has already abandoned one ROMEX line and moved the circuit to a spare. Now it is kicking the breaker again.

I figure the best move would be to set a load center on the end of the house where the ROMEX comes up from underground and treat it as a subpanel. Then abandon all the underground ROMEX and run a 100 amp underground feeder to the new load center.

So what are the odds that all that old ROMEX is going bad underground? It has probably been there 20 years.

 

[wyliesdiesels]

Came on here thinking someone was kicking breakers with their foot.

Proper term is TRIPPING

Yikes.

Rip all that out and run a feeder.

Are you sure its Romex, aka NM-b?

What color is it?

 

[pattenp]

If it is indeed Romex then it's a good chance that moisture has gotten in it and causing a random short. I had to fix the same problem on an old house that had a Romex feeder run to a detached garage underground in conduit. The conduit collected water and the Romex failed, but the Romex managed to work for over 15 years before failing.

 

[shadycrew31]

Dumb question, are you sure there isn't a short in one of the loads thats being fed by the line, or that the breaker isn't failing? Seems strange that two lines failed...

 

[rpcraft]

Just a thought, have you tried swapping out the breaker? Maybe with a new one or one that is known not to be tripping previously?

 

[Leaflessshadetree]

Dumb question, are you sure there isn't a short in one of the loads thats being fed by the line, or that the breaker isn't failing? Seems strange that two lines failed...

Not strange at all if the are Romex and were run at the same time.

 

[My Old Tools]

Yes, tried a new breaker. Also tripped with all loads off. Pretty sure it is all plain old NM-b.

 

[matt_i]

If I read right, every circuit has an additional 40 feet of underground wiring between the remote panel and the house (?)

If so, that seems like a large waste of wire plus the obvious no-no of putting NM-b underground.

I like your idea to relocate the load center, pull THHN underground and land the existing circuits on the new load center. I would also negotiate rights to the scrap copper as I think there will be a bit of it

 

[My Old Tools]

Yep, you got it right. I doubt we can even pull the old stuff out after all this time. Probably have to dig a new trench.

 

[Bretny]

If its tripping the breaker with no loads and you put a new breaker in it sounds like a new feeder is needed. Your DVOM should tell you this.

 

[toplessHO]

we used to have a machine called a thumper for finding faults in underground direct burial feeders
You could actually see the dirt jump in the spot it was bad.
not that you would need something like this,its just triggered another old memory