Spent 4 hours chasing a ghost voltage on a dishwasher install

Last Tuesday I was swapping a control board on a 5 year old Bosch dishwasher. Everything looked fine but the new board wouldn't power up. I checked the outlet, got 120V so I was stumped. After 3 hours of testing wires and replacing the board again, I realized the neutral was loose inside the junction box under the sink. took 10 seconds to fix after that. Anyone else ever get tricked by a bad connection that looks good?

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1 Comment

mark_cooper1mo ago

You know, that's exactly the kind of thing that makes you want to pull your hair out. Have you ever had a neutral wire that looked perfectly crimped but was just barely hanging on inside the wire nut? I've seen that more than once on older installations where the wires get brittle from heat and vibration. The voltage reads fine with no load, but the second you put any draw on it, the circuit goes dead. It's one of those tricks that separates the weekend warriors from the guys who have been doing this for years.