Could SWG cause humming in breaker box every 6 mins?

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harleysilo

harleysilo

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Mar 1, 2012
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North Georgia
So for the past 2 days lights have been flickering in my house.

Called power company all good from transformer to meter.

While standing by panel i noticed a hum. It's occurring every 6:XX mins. This is when the lights dim.

If i turn off pool sub panel it stops (95%) sure, gonna try one more time just heard it again.

My SWG is set to run 25% currently, and i'm only using one pump timer, it is set to run from 8-5:30 or 9.5 hours. I just checked and it says the SWG is off because the % was met. So it starts running at 8 am and turns off somewhere around 10:30 vs. 25% of each hour run.

I'm kind of answering my own question i guess, it shouldn't be the SWG.

But what else pool related could cause a breaker box to hum every 6 mins?

(it just happened again and i could feel the vibration in the breaker for the pool sub panel)
 
Is anything coming on every 6 mins? heater?SWG?Pump?

vibration in the breaker box? now that's just strange to me. do you have a mouse in there getting the ol electric chair treatment?

I'm not an electrician...so my post may be 98% worthless.

Have you taken the cover off so you can see what is there to be seen?
 
SWGs are usually on at least a 2 hour cycle so 25% would be turning on and off after 30 min but not on again for 90 min. So I don't think it would be the SWG either.

But how long does the hum (dimming) last?
 
Old breakers can hum with load but it still requires a pretty high load before they hum so something is drawing current periodically. Washer? Sump Pump?
 
it's a 2+ year old 100 AMP Siemens breaker. I've got the pool pump, pool heat pump, SWG, Pool Cover motor, Hot water heater and SWG all on that circuit. With Hot tub off, and heater now off, the humming is not occurring.

So something has changed, either the breaker IS going bad, or something else started drawing too much juice every 6 mins. on this circuit, right? How could it be that it's every 6 min?
 
harleysilo said:
it's a 2+ year old 100 AMP Siemens breaker. I've got the pool pump, pool heat pump, SWG, Pool Cover motor, Hot water heater and SWG all on that circuit. With Hot tub off, and heater now off, the humming is not occurring.

So something has changed, either the breaker IS going bad, or something else started drawing too much juice every 6 mins. on this circuit, right? How could it be that it's every 6 min?
Click to expand...
A thermal overload somewhere could cool down enough to reset itself every six minutes. And then trip again as soon as it was powered up.
 

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I'd R&R the breaker...but that's just because a breaker is less expensive than calling an electrician out.

Wait, so hottub is off, and heater is off...now problem is gone? what kind of heater are you using? heatpump/electric?
 
Well if the humming stopped after you took the hot tub and heater out, then it has to be one of them. or the combination of them. hook them back up individually for 20 minutes or so and see which one causes the humming.
 
Electric Heat Pump for Pool
Electric Hot tub

8:30 AM today

So this morning i'm sitting hear when the pool pump kicks on. So that motor is nice and cold, and when it started up the dimming was all over the place, every few seconds. Now that it's been a few mins. the dimming is getting back on that 6 min. rhythm.

The hot tub is powered up and may or may not have been heating at that point in time.

10:00 Am Today

At some point over the past 1.5 hours the dimming stopped. The heat pump is not on.

So the breaker can handle the pool pump and hot tub after the pool's pump has "warmed up"?
Why would the pool pump stop causing the breaker to hum?
It's been a few hours now and the dimming has stooped.
 
So the humming only occurs when the pool pump is on?

Might be a failing capacitor or perhaps a centrifugal switch. What is the pump model?
 
You need to put a amp testing system on that breaker to see what the total draw is.

Humming is not normal, somethings wrong. Could be a loose connection (that is my guess), could be a bad breaker, could be a fire just waiting to happen. Theres a lot of energy running through that 100A breaker, way more than you can ever imagine.
 
We had the same problem. It was our heat pump. The problem was something called a thermistor (sp) It was under warranty so the guy came and replaced the part. My husband said it looked like a tv tube. It took us days to find out what was causing the humming sound.
We didn't notice it outside but it sounded like it was either under our kitchen floor or behind a wall. (it turned out there was a cable from the outside box to the inside box on the joist below the kitchen floor. We finally figured out that it was starting at exactly the same time every day which led us to know it was pool related. It was really hot out so we didn't notice that the heater wasn't on because we thought the water was just over the temp needed to turn it on.
I don't know if your problem is similar but hope this info helps a little. The repair guy said the sound was the heater trying to start.
 
Update: Heat pump compressor is bad.

The Heat pump's fan was running, which is why i thought it was working, but the compressor was not running. Every 6 mins. it was trying to pull ~150 Amps, which is what was causing the light to dim. The 100 Amp breaker was not tripping because the compressor only tries to pull 150 amps for 1 to 1.5 seconds.

Hayward is warrantying the compressor but it will still cost me several hundred in labor, should be fixed next week.
 
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