tedbear - 11/5/2026 07:12

Loose connection is my guess.

I had this situation on the farm. Power comes to a pole in the middle of the yard and spreads out to various buildings. The feed to the house is about 70 years old and is underground. At times, the power in the house was fine but at other times the 220V circuits and some 110V circuits would fail. The remaining 110V circuits were fine.

The problem was difficult to trace down because everything worked fine most of the time.

The local electrican suspected a problem in the underground feed to the house. I didn't suspect a problem in the other out buildings since they are not used much any more. Turns out they were failing at times also but I wasn't aware of it.

His men replaced the main undergound feed to the house. The breaker box in the house was an outdated Push Matic style. We decided to replace it with a modern circuit breaker box. Current code requires a main disconnect on the outside of the house so in case of a fire, the firemen can easily disconnect all power to the house.

After all this the problem remained. The main electrican's foreman came out and checked at the pole. He found the problem in about 2 minutes. Turns out due to age, one of the leads from the generator switch on the pole was loose. Sometimes it would make contact and other times not. The solution was embarassingly simple. He just tightened up the loose connection.

This probably wasn't a total waste of money since the underground wiring was quite old and parts for the old circuit breaker box are difficult to find. I actually had some insurance coverage on it that I wasn't aware of.

The electrician I deal with has a tester that I cannot remember the name of but can test the condition of the wire to help eliminate extra work and replacing things unnecessarily. That being said when the electrician comes even with out that tester they should come on a windy day and turn EVERYTHING on to find a poor connection.