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  • Odd electrical problem.

    Hello..
    We've been having a rather odd problem, seemingly with the wiring in the basement of our home.

    What happens, is when one turns the bathroom fan off, it seems to interrupt, or .. something, the power in that circuit. The living room shares this circuit, and when one turns off the bathroom fan, there is an audible pop from the stereo speakers, lines on the TV, and when I had my ethernet/cable modem pluggen into it, i'd lose my connection, and need to reset them. My printer would also 'restart'. Also, perhaps a coincidence.. all appliances that have died recently, were on that circuit. A water cooler, a de-humidifier, and one of my network switches (lan). Also.. we have a motion sensor night light, so when one wanders to the bathroom, it comes on. When you shut off the fan, that night light does it's little 'blink fest', as it does when you first plug it in.

    Now.. my first thought, was perhaps the fan itself was bad.. so I replaced the exhaust fan with a new one. Didn't solve the problem. I tried replacing the light switch used to start it. Again, didn't help. I thought perhaps the circuit was overloaded, so unplugged everything, except my printer. Which continued to 'reset', and later, the night light, which also continued to 'reset'.

    Any suggestions/advice, as to what the problem could be?
    .. thanks

  • #2
    The fan which is a motor presents to the circuit an inductive load. That means when you first turn on a motor it's a dead short! When the motor turns it tries to follow a rotating magnetic field within its windings. When the motor stops it induces an opposing magnetic field into the windings and the rest of the circuit it's connected to. Sensitive electronic equipment picks up this field andcauses the pop in your speakers. You could try switching the wires around in your breaker panel so that the induced voltage is on the other leg which is out of phase with the other one.

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