There’s something seriously messed up here. Faulty breaker panel seems like a good place to start looking, I think.
The additional weirdness here is that it’s 210V; I would really expect 240V because that would make a lot more sense.
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Yeah, makes no sense to me at all. Waiting for the experts to explain it in words of one syllable or less.
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The utility company is pumping faulty electrons through the wires.
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Shouldn’t that be “tubes?”
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You’re thinking of teh interwebs.
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Not surprising. Most electrical utilities haven’t made a single new electron since 1930, and are just recycling the old ones. They’re gonna break down sooner or later.
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So tell me how this makes sense. Electrician says the hot to neutral is 120, but the hot to ground is 210. He stopped trying to figure it out and just ripped it out back to the box and rewired the whole damned thing. Said the circuit was really old, and if it was grounded he couldn’t figure out how. Better off with a new circuit anyway, i suppose. I know nothing about electrical stuff.
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Maybe: The “ground” at your board wasn’t grounded. The entire electrical distribution of your house was floating at 90 V above the local ground. So having one hand on your toaster frame and one foot on the ground outside would give you a belt.
(there’s probably more than one way to get the same effect, that’s just the one that springs to mind)
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So, if he’s got it properly grounded now, we should be ok? I hate being so totally ignorant!
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generation loss reusing all those old electrons. i blame tik tok.
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“It’s the damn 5g” shakes cane at sky
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If he’s tied the circuit-internal earth to ground, then he’ll probably go around the house with a circuit tester to make sure. Basically, the hot/neutral have a voltage relative to the circuit ground, but it might be that the ground points in some parts of the house are connected directly to the earth instead of the circuit. (You’d think "why not have multiple earth points? Well, that way can lead to ground loops and all sorts of madness without careful isolation.) So the hot/neutral/ground is still right, but you’re not connected to the circuit ground. but directly to an earth point which may have drifted wildly from circuit ground.
So it’s not just about re-wiring the box, but making sure that there are three leads from the box to your heater controller, not two and someone cheaped out and tied the ground to a nearby copper pipe or something.
I have no idea if any of that made sense.
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Is the ground connected to your water pipe?
At my house we were tracing some weird electrical problems that ultimately turned out to be caused by my neighbor’s house having some wonky connection sending power through the ground, into their water pipe and ultimately traveling over to ours through the water main coming in from the street. We were able to confirm voltage in our water pipe that went away if the neighbor shut off their breaker. Our own wiring was correct and it would have been nice if they just fixed the scary wiring in their house but instead we put in a non-conductive section of pipe in our water main and added a new grounding rod to our house, which did the trick.
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I think that is exactly it. The ground did not go to the box. It was hooked to a pipe, but that pipe got cut off and tied into PVC at some point. Should i point out that the house is 130+ years old and has knob and tube, armored cable, Romex and probably everything else in it. The controller was wired into a fuse box with a 40 amp cartridge fuse in it then onto the breaker box. Why? Who knows. It’s been removed now and propetly wired. They are going to come back Monday to check ground on the parts of the house that were not gutted and rewired. What a mess. Oh well, life is an adventure. At least we have heat.
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In theory, modern houses don’t have those kinds of problems. In reality, they keep coming up with new ways to screw things up. We spent a lot of money and months of time living in a fraction of our house because it was piped in PVC, which became brittle and caused a leak in our crawl space. That caused water damage in the flooring for part of the house, and also up in the attic because, even though multiple remediation crews denied that it was possible, there was an air channel from the crawl space to the attic, and all the hot humid air from the crawl space went up to the attic to make it damp and moldy.
We re-piped the house in PEX. Fingers crossed.
I duly hope your house drama is resolved.
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Which mice love to chew on. So please be aware!
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Oh, yeah. It’s waxy. 
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Mice are crazy. We had some eating Lava hand soap in the basement.
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