My outlet is on two circuits at once... Discussion ThreadMy outlet is on two circuits at once... Electrical Advice
I have an ancient home with knob and tube wiring, and a breaker box from the 70s. It's all a mess, with circuits powering random things on opposite ends of the house. The breaker box has breakers with multiple wires spliced or coming out of the stud and all the neutral studs are overloaded with wires. Yes I would update this if I could afford it but until then I have one thing in particular that I cannot understand:
I went to update an outlet in my bedroom and I found that it is receiving power from TWO breakers - and I don't mean one per plug with the tabs broken off. I mean when I just off breaker 9, one wire is hot, and when I shut off breaker 11 the other wire is hot (note: these breakers are next to each other like a 220 situation but they are separate, 110V, 15A breakers). So far my phone charger works on this outlet. I've tried a lamp for only about a minute and it worked fine. Is this basically an accidental 220V set up? How could they have wired these circuits to work this way? Is this very dangerous? It must have been like this for decades by now.
P.S. there's no ground wire to speak of.
My outlet is on two circuits at once... for the original thread on Electricians Forums
I have an ancient home with knob and tube wiring, and a breaker box from the 70s. It's all a mess, with circuits powering random things on opposite ends of the house. The breaker box has breakers with multiple wires spliced or coming out of the stud and all the neutral studs are overloaded with wires. Yes I would update this if I could afford it but until then I have one thing in particular that I cannot understand:
I went to update an outlet in my bedroom and I found that it is receiving power from TWO breakers - and I don't mean one per plug with the tabs broken off. I mean when I just off breaker 9, one wire is hot, and when I shut off breaker 11 the other wire is hot (note: these breakers are next to each other like a 220 situation but they are separate, 110V, 15A breakers). So far my phone charger works on this outlet. I've tried a lamp for only about a minute and it worked fine. Is this basically an accidental 220V set up? How could they have wired these circuits to work this way? Is this very dangerous? It must have been like this for decades by now.
P.S. there's no ground wire to speak of.
My outlet is on two circuits at once... for the original thread on Electricians Forums
