re: #42 A Cranky One

There are two 110V lines that come into a house, that are out of phase. One goes to one side of the breaker panel and the other goes to the other side. You probably lost one of the lines, so only half the breaker panel is energized.

re: #47 ObserverArt

Yep. That’s what I figured. Just never had that happen. Usually the whole panel is out if there is any kind of an outage.

As I mentioned up above, AEP was out a month or so ago because there was flickering going on. Never went all the way out, but it would sometimes flash the lights or trigger some of the more sensitive circuits like computers, TV, etc. off and back on quickly. Same transformer they are replacing now. Same circuits in my house and neighbors.

It’s even more fun in here in Europe. The common feed here is 230/400 V 3-phase nominal (50 Hz mains frequency). One night babysitting for a friend, a spotlight decided give up the ghost in the dead short scenario. Breaker tripped, but that’s when the fun started.
I reset the breaker, but things don’t come on. Then I begin trying to locate the error by turning things on random circuits on. I switch the stove on for example, and the circuit that was previously dead came alive, albeit a little dim. It took a while for me to realize that what was going on was that the short had killed the phase fuse by the meter, and that the heating element in the stove acted like a voltage divider on the dead phase.
Nothing worse than a call to the super couldn’t fix.