The other day after my wife was using our oven, she yelled frantically for me to look at the oven. With the oven in the “off” position, the bake element had a spot on it that closely resembled spark from a plasma cutter.
The burning spot on the element was slowly making it’s way around the element. When removing screws on element fixture, I noticed some considerable arcing. I turned breaker off afterward, and removed element which broke in half upon removal.
My question is this: Do ovens have any voltage on the leads that attach to the element even when oven isn’t baking?
[COLOR=Blue]Do ovens have any voltage on the leads that attach to the element even when oven isn’t baking?[/COLOR]
They should not but there are a couple provisos on this.
If the unit grounds out, in other words somehow completes a path to the frame they could have voltage. They can short from their metal stand offs sometimes. Elements should be isolated from ground and only have L1 to L2 (240 volts) on them.
You will often see a low AC voltage on a line in a unit (ghost voltage) it is there but it is not really true voltage as it cannot push any significant amount of current. The unit is AC so if an wire is next to an AC wire a voltage will be induced on the other wire due to the rising/falling electromagnetic field.
Same idea as a generator.