What did I work on "today", well it was yesterday now.
Soooooooooo, the door bell hasn't been working for a while, yesterday I jumped into getting this very simple contraption ding dongging again. I went up in the attic with my volt tester and found exactly what I thought I was going to, that the transformer wasn't putting out any power. Being both front and rear bells stopped ding dongging at the same time, this was a no brainer. I pulled back the tape off the wire going to the transformer and sure thing, 116 volts, but nothing coming out of the transformer. Off to Dale for a new one.
New transformer installed. Still nothing! WTH? Upon a little more checking, I found that it had the 116 volt at the old connection but not at the new connection to the transformer, there it had ZIP! You see, I cut the old leads from the old transformer to splice in the new one, so this meant the whole time there was nothing wrong with the transformer, it was the lead to the house wiring that was bad! GRRRRRR
I figure I will leave the new transformer being it's installed. I repair the lead, ok, 116 volt at the connection, STILL NO POWER coming from the transformer! WTH? I mean, come on now, WTH?
Could it be bad? I hook up the old one, STILL NOTHING! WTH?
Back to Dale with both new and old transformers. The guy goes back into the bowels of the ship to test it, comes back to me to tell me the new transformer was bad! But the old one is fine! WTH?
He brought me back in there to show me and yep, the old transformer is showing 24 volts.........seems I was testing that on DC thinking like it was a battery being it's such low volts, I don't know, I am a moron.
I came back, installed the OLD transformer and WHAM, DING DONG, DING DONG. The problem all the while was the broken lead going to the original transformer that I could have done in minutes. But check out the luck, the new transformer was bad! If I had been testing it on AC I would have figured that out when I tested the old transformer after fixing the wire, but I didn't think to hook it back to the door bell, I mean come on, I am head tech in THREE STOOGES HOME REPAIR, I have the volt meter to tell me if it's good.........the DING DONG I heard at the end was the door bell calling me names.
Brian