Video Transcript
Hey, William here with E P X. Wanted to get on here real quick and talk about what does it mean when you lose a a hot leg? What does that mean, right? Or better yet, what is, what does it mean when you lose half of the power in your home, right? Maybe half of the house and the other house you have power or your appliances aren’t working. So I’m gonna explain to you what that means and what typically happens.
So in an electrical panel you got the main cutoff or emergency breaker here, okay? Or service disconnect. And then you’ve got all of your breakers in the electrical panel. All right? So then you’ve got, so when you see a single pole breaker that means that’s 120 volt circuit, all right? When you see a two pole breaker that means that’s a two 40 volt circuit, right?
All right, so I opened up this panel to show you the wiring coming in. So if you have a main breaker panel sometimes it’s on the top or sometimes it’s at the bottom. So in this case, the main breaker is at the top, obviously and then you’ve got your power coming in. Okay? So this is a hot leg, and this is another hot leg which means this is a single phase system which 99% of percent of homes have single phase power coming into their home. And then here’s the the neutral, and then here’s the ground. Okay?
So when a house loses half of their power typically it’s on the utility side. So either a transformer has gone bad or a connection got loose, something of that nature. Okay? So when you lose a hot leg or when you lose a phase okay? This, this would also be a double phase system, okay? This would be a phase, and this would be B phase. We’re in Austin. In Austin, the color, the first color is red, and then black in Dallas, the first color is black and then red. It’s just the way they do things.
So when you lose a hot leg or a phase then that means you’re gonna lose half of the power in the electrical panel. So it’s broken down into a phase and B phase. Alright? So the way that it goes down the line here you start at the top, right? That would be a phase B phase. Okay, let me use my screwdriver so that way my hands, you can see it better. All right? So this would be aase B, face A face, B face A face, B face, and you just go down the line. All right?
So let’s say you lost a phase over here on the left then that means all of the A phase circuits will not work anymore until the problem is fixed, right? Or if it’s the B phase hot leg that, that you lost then that means B phase breakers will not work. Okay? So then on a two 40 volt circuit since you need both phases or or both hot legs then it makes sense that it’s not gonna turn on that appliance because only one hot leg will be on and the other one will be off.
So that’s why you lose half of the power in your house, and that’s why appliances that are two 40 volts do not turn on, okay? So like your furnace, your oven, the AC unit, mini split those are typically two 40 volt circuits your EV charger, right?
So then you lose half of the power. It’s not gonna work. In those cases, when that happens you could call an electrician to come out you’re probably gonna have to pay a service trip charge but that’s not what we recommend. We recommend you call your utility provider first have them come out and check your power because it’s it’s free or it should be free. Most of the time it is. So that way they can check to make sure that you haven’t lost a hot leg or a or a face. So that way you can be sure that their side is good. Then the next step would be call an an electrician because something else is going on. It might be a bad main breaker or there might be a loose connection on on the wires coming into the panel. There could be a variety of things.
