[Shop-talk] Electrical fire waiting to happen

[David Scheidt]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 1:28 PM, Mike Rambour <mikey at b2systems.com> wrote:
>  The house I am moving into in August has a 40amp panel  (yes 40, I had
> never seen one either) with 4 fuses, running my Skilsaw when the fridge
> kicked in blew the fuse.  Garage is on a 10amp fuse with a single light
> bulb in it.  The other 3 fuses are 15 amp, one for the kitchen, one for
> the living room and one bedroom and then the last one for the 2 bedrooms
> and 2 bathrooms. I was surprised you can still buy glass fuses.  I
> wonder what will happen when my daughter and my wife run their
> blowdriers at the same time :)   Hell, I wonder if I can even run a
> computer...

I've seen 40 amp panels before, in ancient buildings (usually coupled
with knob-and-tube wires).  The house with the 15 amp kitchen was an
utter nightmare when it came to its wiring.  It was a duplex, built
without electricity.  It was electrified with a very limited set of
circuits, just for lighting.  Somewhat later, but still in the
knob-and-tube era, it had that improved to include some outlets.  Some
time later, more wires were added, in armored cables, and into
recepticles that I've never seen anywhere else -- they had the two
blades at an angle to each other, like a private's stripes.  There
were a precious handful of adapters that allowed a normal two pronged
plug to be plugged in.  The next modification was a seperate service
that supplied the hot water heater (shared between the two halves of
the duplex) and the kitchen ranges.  The water heater was in my side
of the basement, but the box in the neighbor's.  When that blew, you
had to get him to reset it.  The previous tenet had worked from home,
and convinced the landlord to install some new wires (I think, by
doing the work before he asked if he could).  That meant there was a
new 100 amp box that fed the old glass fuse box as a sub panel, and
which provided 20 amp circuits to the office, one bedroom, and the
bathroom.  I don't think he cooked, or he would have put some there
too.

Glass fuses are still available because there are lots of boxes that
still use them.  Most places require that if you replace the box, you
have to update the wires.  So it's common to improve the wiring by
adding a new main panel, feeding the existing one as a sub-panel.  As
long as the wiring is in good shape, there's nothing really wrong with
this, if it's done by a sane person.

-- 
David Scheidt
dmscheidt at gmail.com