I just had an electrical event of some sort at my home. Every incandescent light burned very brightly for about 3 seconds or so. The circuit breaker for the oven, which was on at the time, flipped. Afterward, there was a small amount of smoke coming from the oven, and the door latching mechanism for the self-clean cycle seems to have locked the door shut. The oven is on a 220 volt circuit.
My best guess is that something went wrong with the oven, and bridged 220V to the rest of the house through the panel until the breaker flipped. Is that possible? Likely? My worry is that something else actually caused the problem, and the oven failure is a symptom rather than a cause.
The smoke has stopped, and there’s no sign of any problem anywhere. So do I call the fire department now, or the appliance repairman tomorrow?
An electrician is probably who you want to call, although an appliance repairman may be in your future too.
I had something similar happen to me in an old rental house. What happened there was that the “hot” wires from two out-of-phase 110v circuits touched in a junction box full of an old wiring, resulting in 220v between the two circuits. (Which is pretty much how you get 220v for the heating element in your oven). All the lights on those circuits got super bright and then popped and bunch of my electronics got fried. The breakers didn’t pop because there wasn’t enough current actually going through either breaker to trip them.
It could be that if one of the two circuits running your oven somehow touched one of the other circuits in the house, it could have sent 220v to other stuff in the house. The electronic controls in the stove usually only run off one of the 110v circuits, so if that circuit touched another 110v circuit that had some lights running off it, that could explain the really bright lights and the now non-functional oven controls.
I’m not sure how likely that particular scenario actually is, but an electrician would probably be the most likely to be able to isolate the problem to the house wiring, the appliance, or the outside power supply even if he can’t fix the last two.
unplug anything valuable you don’t want to replace. turn off the breakers for wired in things like dishwasher, furnace/boiler that you don’t want to replace.
turn on a bunch of incandescent lights throughout the house. look normal? some look brighter? some look dimmer?
if you have some brighter and some dimmer or they vary in brightness then you might have a bad neutral wire, this might be inside (your responsibility) or outside (utility responsibility) the house.
what actually might have happened and the fix needs to be determined by an experienced person at your house.
Off the top of my head…
If the neutral is open no 110 circuit will work.
If the neutral is shorted to 110 half the circuits will be at 220, the other half won’t work as the potential will be the same on both sides of the circuit.
Of course I could be wrong, but this seems to make sense to my 15 watt brain.
I would unplug the stove and have it inspected by a professional.
If the main neutral connection breaks or has a really bad connection, you end up with what is called a floating neutral. The voltage from line 1 to line 2 will still be 220 volts, but the voltage between the neutral and either line may not be 110. The neutral ends up being a voltage divider which depends on the loads connected. So line 1 to neutral might be 80 volts and line 2 to neutral 140, line 1 to neutral might be 160 volts and line 2 to neutral might be 50 volts, etc. The two voltages will add to 220, but where they’ll be in the middle depends on the proportion of the current going to each phase.
A lot of stuff will work over a fairly wide range of voltages, so if the voltage stays close enough to balanced everything might work reasonably well and not blow up. The voltages will fluctuate depending on the load, though, so as the load changes things could get really ugly really fast. If you turn on a heavy load on line 1, then line 1’s voltage drops and line 2’s voltage goes up. Any lights on line 2 would then get brighter.
This is important enough to repeat it. The type of problem being discussed here is the type of problem that is very likely to cause a fire and burn your house down. It needs to be checked out ASAP.