This morning's alarm

Greg K

Well-known Member
Fire dept pager went off at 5:30 this
morning about a house fire dealing with the
wiring. When we got there we found that
there was a 6 way splitter plugged into the
outlet and an electric heater plugged into
that. It was really fortunate that it never
actually caught on fire, just burned the
plastic and charred the paneling under a
desk.
Reminds me of a job where I was called in
to find out why the power flickered in the
livin room. Found a blue plastic outlet box
mounted on the surface of the wall against
the carpet. The outlet was wired with the
wires coming in under 1 set of screws and
the wires out under another set (perfectly
legal but not the best way) but they were
not tight. It charred the outlet, melted
through the box, and melted the carpet under
it. That is shown in the second set of pics.
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Shouldn't that have tripped the breaker? My wife set up Christmas lights on the fence out by the road, and used 2 long extension cords across the lawn. Didn't get them plugged together solidly, and it wound up burning up both plug and socket. Not a big deal, being outside, but I also wondered there why a breaker didn't trip. I thought that's what they were for.
 
Yes it did trip the breaker eventually. Breakers trip 2 ways. Magnetically, like in a dead short and thermally like in a prolonged minor overload. This probably caused a dead short when the plastic holding the metal parts apart melted allowing live parts to touch grounded parts. A bad connection can create quite a bit of heat without tripping a breaker.
 
When I was still working in the inspection business, we used to see a lot of that type problem with the house's wired with aluminium wire. A lot of homes built in and around the 70's used it. "A lot" of problems..........Jim in N.M.
 
I ran into a lot of that when I was doing inspections.

All interior residential inspections required a photo of the breaker box (among other required photos) and asked if there was any aluminum wiring present. And there was an era from the early '70's till the late '80's where you could almost bet on it.
 
Breakers are for over current protection and will not trip on loose connections. If you are on a 15 amp circuit you can dissipate about 1800 watts of heat. That is a lot of heat and can easily start a fire if concentrated in a small location such as a loose screw on a receptical.
 

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