Clean AC power

Anyone remember that scene from Fight Club where Ed Norton's character goes down into the basement and wades in waist deep water to replace an old style screw in fuse that's sparking all over the place?

All the best,
Nonoise

vgizzi OP9 posts

07-06-2021
11:03am

jea48: Who would have thought that cleaning a circuit breaker’s contacts would be so dangerous? Should I move my family to a hotel until the problem can be fixed?

Should I move my family to a hotel until the problem can be fixed?

LOL, No.... Just don’t try to overload a 15 or 20 amp circuit to see if the breaker will trip open. It may or it may not trip open.
House was built in 1992 and it is still standing.

When the electrician comes out to look at the panel he will pull out the breakers, (not all at once) and inspect the breaker bus connectors for arcing damage as well as the connector on the Line side of the breakers. He may also look for discoloration on the branch circuit breaker hot conductors insulation as well as the branch circuit neutral wire insulation for discoloration. (Two causes. Loose connection. Wire overloaded for an extended time for possibly months or years).

If by chance in the winter months you use a portable electric space heater I would suggest you have the electrician pull the wall duplex receptacle(s) out of the wall box where the heater was plugged in and inspect the wire connections on the outlet. If the circuit was overloaded for hours upon hours over time the wire at the terminals will be discolored. Insulation on the wires near the terminations will be discolored, maybe brittle and or cracked. If the duplex outlets were used for in and out connections for the branch circuit wiring then all duplex outlets upstream toward the electrical panel on the circuit should be checked for damage.
15 amp branch circuits, 14awg wire, are the most abused, overloaded, by things like portable space heaters and such.


It may have been a blessing you cleaned the terminations on the load side of the breaker and posted it here on your thread.
You can thank @ 4krowme for peaking my interest and asking you who the manufacturer of the panel is/was.

I am not familiar with Challenger electrical panels. I have never seen one around here. I am quite familiar with FPE (commonly called F****ing Poor Equipment), and Zinsco (GTE-Sylvania). Both were sued out of existence.

Some of their breakers might trip open. Others were/are nothing more than ON/OFF disconnect switches.

There are ways of checking how clean your power is but the fact that you are so far away from everything and everyone else helps a lot as well as having your own dedicated transformer. Your power should be just fine in all of these cases unless you are overloading the transformer or the transformer is making the power line noisy because it is wearing out.

vgizzi- Who would have thought that cleaning a circuit breaker’s contacts would be so dangerous? Should I move my family to a hotel until the problem can be fixed?

A little background and perspective on the zeitgeist here. Couple years ago when I wanted to add a pre-amp out to my amp it seemed a pretty simple mod others here would have done and so I asked. No one had anything the least bit helpful. Three or four times I was WARNED and CAUTIONED to NOT look INSIDE as tube amps have LETHAL VOLTAGE. I said well I was planning on unplugging it. IT WILL KILL YOU EVEN UNPLUGGED! LETHAL VOLTAGE!!!!

No kidding. Zero useful information, pure flat out fear mongering. The answer turned out to be as simple as this https://www.epanorama.net/circuits/speaker_to_line.html Two resistors, $2 total, half an hour tops, hour including the trip to the electrical parts store. For this I was told to spend $5k on an amp I don’t need, or die, burning down my neighborhood in the process. You may notice I do not often ask questions here. Now you know why.

The practical, useful and ultimately truly safe way to look at it is to understand voltage and current. Once you do, well that is how I have been able to completely wire a house, completely install and wire a whole panel, run 240V with a step down to my system, modify countless components, on and on, all without killing myself or burning down the neighborhood.

You can do it, too. Shame anyone wants to frighten people away from learning practical useful skills that ultimately help you become a more capable, independent individual.