I have a brand new hotpoint 24 inch electric stove. I've had an electrician test the power outlet in the wall and it is good. Only when I turn the stove on and use a volt meter to the stove and the sink it reads 35 volts. The electrician said that the wire coming out of the wall is a service entrance with aluminum wire. The circuit breaker is approximately 65 feet from this stove so it is a long aluminum cable that goes through the walls. If I have to replace the wire with copper romex than I will do it but I'm having a hard time justifying this if the aluminum wire is fine. This stove is in a tenants apartment too and I replaced the previous stove which was also a hotpoint with the one that is in there now. The previous stove also had the same problem. The old stove was hooked up directly, with out a 3 prong plug. The new stove has a new surface outlet and heavy gauge 3 prong plug. Im having a hard time believing that the old and new stove are defective but I guess it is possible. Are newer electric stoves OK with service entrance aluminum wire? Any help would be appreciated.

Don, a few points:


I'm confused the electrician told you that the wire coming out of the wall is "Service Entrance Cable"????

Service Entry Cables are just that. They connect to the Power Company, to the Main Service Panel only.SEU cable was perfectly legal and safe to use for 3-wire range and dryer circuits for many years. In fact the NEC specifically mentioned it.




My suspicion is that the stove is not grounded properly. Particularly if you went from a three wire 120/240 circuit to the current code standard of a 4 wire circuit.If SEU cable was used then there would be NO safe way to convert to 4-wire, nor would you need/want to.




The most suspect connection would be on the stove itself. If Neutral and Ground are connected to the frame of the stove, that bounding needs to be removed;. Neutral should go to the Neutral connector on the cable and ground should go to the Green connector on the cable.

The only place that it now allowed to contain the ground and neutral to be bonded together is the Main Service Panel.This is dangerous advice considering the situation.
A 3-wire range circuit was fine to use for many years, although this allowance is not gone. The neutral served as both the neutral AND ground. The ground WAS bonded to the neutral conductor inside the appliance.
If this is the case here the bond should NOT be removed.

Two questions:

1. Is the suggested hookup 3 or 4 wire?
2. If 4 and you used 3; were the neutral/ground bonds properly placed?
3. Is the water system properly bonded?

Check the quality of the connections. If the neutral/ground is poor you'll get this situation. This is why the neutral is now separated from the ground. In effect the water pipe is becoming a conductor in parallel to the neutral/ground .