Help - Flickering Lights

[Old Guy]

Hi, I have a 20 year old house and the past two days my lights have been flickering. Never had this problem before. I had an electrician in and he tightened all the connections on my electrical panel and it seemed to work for a few hours. I have an ITE Gould panel box and I noticed that one breaker is making a humming noise. The breaker is for one of the bedrooms were one of my kids approximaetly two days ago pluggd a blow dryer into one of her surge protectors that had a few other plugs on it. I checked the outlet with a tool that determines if the conections are ok and it checked out fine. Could the blow dryer and the other loads on the breaker not trip the breaker but just dameage the breaker? I am going nuts trying to find out what has changed over the last few days and this is all I could come up with. Help.....

Thanks

[HayZee518]

The circuit breakers are normally cool to the touch but as they reach the trip point will become warm and occasionally buzz. It all depends on their internal construction and trip mechanism. Some are bi-metal some are magnetic trip. If its the latter then humming is normal. If you have an amprobe or can borrow one, put the jaws around the wire coming out of the breaker and see what the current draw is when everythin g is operating on that circuit. Using two people plug a toaster into the outlet and turn it on and observe the amps as the breaker trips.If its at or slightly below the rating it's ok. If it trips at say 24 amps (20 amps breaker) replace it. 18 amps on a 15 amp breaker replace it.

[HayZee518]

[Old Guy]

Thanks..The main breaker was replaced this afternoon and the problem looks like its gone. The old breaker has two metal clamps that mount on to the box. One of the clamps was black and the metal was extremely weak. Having no qualifications to be able to explain this and realizing that I was not qualified to do this, the work was done by a certified electrician which I feel was well worth every cent since you have to play with the main wires coming in from the street. The Electrician had said to me that I was lucky the way my box was set up so the main could be removed rather easily. He said easily, I was sweating just holding the stupid flash light. Thanks for your response.

[HayZee518]

What you find a lot of times is the main leads are brought directly to the breaker lugs. Most people form a loop in the cable making a field replacement easy.