Ideal 61-164 Circuit Analyzer Review 

IDEALINDUSTRIESUSA Thanks for watching. I often get requests for reviews on products I do not own. I can’t buy every meter that gets requested. I have LOTS of meters, but there are limits to how much the channel can afford to spend. Any chance you can send demo units for review, that I can return after the review? Please email me at understandingmeters@gmail.com, if there is something we can work out.

So what do you think happens when a fault gets cleared? Current flows on the ground wire which is supposed to be a low impedance path back to the source, again, to clear faults. You are correct about the grounded vs ground conductors.

I think SuperV meant that if current flows on the grounding conductor, the breaker needs to trip to stop the current because as you said that is the reason to have that green (or bare) ground wire there.

John Herbst If you have no load on any of those 5 outlets, and the ELL is showing 20 Amps, then this could be a shared neutral that I was showing in the video. You could have another breaker supplying 20 Amps, and that same neutral is connected to those 5 outlets. If those 5 are on a different phase than the 20 Amps are on, that current will go down as you put a load on those outlets. If they are on the same phase, then you have an issue.

@@MultiMeterChannel Makes perfect sense....Thanks

John Herbst Just noticed that you said 2 of the 5 showed 20 Amps ELL. Sounds like your neutrals are all over the place. It looks like the hot is supplied by 1 breaker to the 5 outlets, and 3 are using a different neutral than the other 2, and the other 2 are on a breaker that 20 amps are being drawn on. Worse yet, that other neutral can be used for several breakers all on the same phase, which is why you have 20 on that one neutral. This is why I focused on the fact that the SureTest uses the neutral to show ELL. You could be drawing 5 amps from 4 different breakers that are all using the same neutral with 20 Amps on it. You have some work to do.

@@MultiMeterChannel I do. Its a rental I picked up. Have some work to do.... Really appreciate your help. I will let you know what i determine/find.

Can you recomend any books on troubleshooting i really enjoy these types of videos

Because you mentioned the first outlet is 4 feet from the panel, and because these testers detect bootleg ground by measuring the impedance between the neutral and ground, and since in the main panel your ground and neutral are typically connected to the same bussbar, you could get a bootleg ground reading as this short run of romex has such a low impedance (this is why you will eventually burn out the motor on a table saw when run on a 100 foot extension cord) that it's acting like someone placed a short jumper at the neutral and ground screws on a receptacle. As for the ground wire a much smaller gauge than the hot and neutral, that was once a common practice when romex required a ground wire in the late 1950s/1960s. A friend of mine lives in a house built in 1957 that had the original two slot receptacles when he brought the house about 5 years ago, and was already budgeting for a major rewire at great expense, until he just happened to check a receptacle with a test light and lit up when placed on the hot and the metal box. He then discovered the ground wire was a very fine wire, maybe 18 gauge, wrapped around the romex clamp and hidden from veiw. So my friend was able to use modern 3 slot outlets and they'd be actually grounded.

@@Sparky-ww5re thanks for the input. Issue has been resolved with new 4 ft 12/2 NM. The old wire I pulled out had no shorts that I could detect. I inspected the old wire thoroughly. The same type of downstream outlets still had the old 12/2 wire with the smaller gauge ground wire. I am going to chalk it up to ditance and small gauged ground wire.

@@rockoeasy9150 It's not the size that was the issue, when you get that close to the panel the SureTrace detects a bootleg ground because the ground and neutral are tied together or "bonded" at the main panel. Since it's only a few feet away from the main it's detecting that bond as a bootleg ground. Refer to the user manual and it explains this as well. Hope that helps.

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