All work to be done by licensed professional. WE KEEP GOING UNTIL YOU HAVE THE INFORMATION YOU NEED, I come and go. This is step ONE.

Hello, welcome to Just Answer. I will stay with you on this until we get it figured out, however I am off to bed in an hour, we can pick it up in the morning after that,

Tell me where the air handler is located and what type of outlet is there. Is it a 240 volt receptacle or a switch box, with a breaker or fuses inside

Do you have a multi meter to test voltages with, please describe it,

Thanks

Thats unusual, normally those are hard wired to a switch box

If you are qualified, experienced and safe working with high voltage electricity you can turn the breaker off to that circuit

then remove the receptical from the box its its mounted in, and inspect for a bad wire connection.

If the connections look good, be sure you have all the wires in the open so that none are touching the box or conduit, turn the power back on, and check *between all three combinations of wire. and tell me what reads you get

If you get no power to the back side of the receptacle. but you have power at the break then *both wires, line 1 and line 2 would have be disconnected or broken somewhere between the breaker and the receptacle.

the chances of both being broken are one in a million.

The chances of one of the wire nuts coming loose in a splice box somewhere in between are high

but that would not keep you from getting a 110 volt read from the unbroXXX XXne when checking to the ground wire.

To get continuity you must have the meter set on ohms.... if you put the test probes on live power checking for continuity that way you will burn out a cheap meter, and cause an expensive meter to malfunction

If we do this step by step we can figure this out fast,

First step, Put the meter on volts and check some 110v wall outlets to see if the meter works

Are you in the US or the Uk

Thanks

All receptacles sold in the US legally for 240v service have three wires attached, line 1. line 2 and the ground.

Some have 4 wires attached, a white neutral in addition

These cannot be separate by law, nor are the receptacles and cord caps built to separate the line power from the ground and neutral,

away from that arrangement

Right now we are checking at the receptacle you mentioned, what happens inside the air handler is a different story,

On this end I need to be specific, by 'good' do you mean there is power to the receptacle?

or do you mean it just looks good

Thanks, in that case there is a disconnect of both line one and line two somewhere between the receptacle and the breaker

Ive trained a few dozen men in this business,. after a while one can get a feel for these sorts of situations

A metering mistake is limitlessly more likely than both wires broken

Ive been on dozens of these situations....

it is very easy not to get a voltage read by poking the meter probes into the front slots on the receptacle

thats what most people try, it fails about 80% of the time. no read,

thats due to the way the probe tips fit into the slots,. the don't make good contact.

that is why I wanted you to remove the receptacle from the box its mounted in and check power to the back side of the receptacle where the wires connect

Had you checked it *from the back yet?

And we want to check each wire to ground, and between all combinations of wires.

if its still dead, the odds are that there is a manual disconnect between the breaker and the receptacle

the odds are about 1 in a thousand that both wires have burned off at a junction box hidden between the receptacle and the breaker.

Earlier you said you checked for *continuity* at the breaker, that indicates a mistake in checking the breaker,

it could be, but a J box failure normally just burns one of the lines. not both

sort of like getting flat tires on a car, its one at a time, not all 4

Tell me the minute details of how you checked for voltage on the 240 volt breaker in the breaker panel, did you have to remove the face of the panel, the one with all the rectangular knock outs on it:

Thanks

Tell me the details of how you checked continuity on the breaker, did you have to remove it from the panel entirely to do that:?

Normally we do not need to check *continuity on a breaker, we can, but we do not. we check for voltage on the breaker wire connection when its snapped into place in the panel... and if we get voltage there, we know its good

so this continuity thing has me confused.... the only way a continuity check makes sense is if you remove the entire breaker from the panel. remove all the wires, and take to the kitchen table and use an ohm meter to test between the clip in the back that grabs the bus and the wire terminal.

If you have voltage you would not need to remove the breaker to check continuity

This is why I am suspecting the meter reads

In the past I have made the mistake of checking the wrong breaker, and found that it was another breaker that was off, and the one I was working on was for another system

That is the type of situation one usually finds in these cases