For the “Yup, that’s me again!”…
Came back home Saturday afternoon from a trip out, my brother came to visit us and the kids, and as I step in the house I smell burned plastic.
I really hate that, being an IT for over 15 years–that smell to me ring all the"warning" bells…
So after a quick check seems all is fine except the smell is still there and stronger close to the panel of the house electrical mains.
Oh. Fkcu.
I open the small door to access the income main switch and the smell is strong.
As soon as I touch the plastic with the back of my fingers I remove them and throw it off because it was sizzling hot.
Muffling my curses because the kids are scared already by the sudden turns of events, I whip out my phone and inspect the inside of the thing.
So… Yeah.
No electricity since yesterday 16:00…
I called immediately the landlord and after checking with his electrician he said that only Sunday morning at 0900 he could come.
Luckily we had ready to cook lasagna packages (really good stuff!) that the above neighbour cooked in their oven for us.
Amazing people, we’ve been friends since we came to live here and never regretted it.
So, I saved the house, we had candlelight dinner, steaming hot lasagna, and my brother to tell stories of his job as cook in Germany.
Could have been worse.
In any case, the guy has been here and fixed the thing by replacing the whole panel and brand new income switch.
Have a merry Christmas!
What scared me was thinking : “what if it happened while we were sleeping?”
But I’m steering my mind away from that and just trying to be happy nothing bad happened.
As Victork2 said, lucky you caught it early, and can easily get fixed, might be an idea to get the whole house checked whilst the electrician is there.
Oh boy. How? Why? My Italian is marginal but I guess that’s a ground fault current interrupter? Did it short internally? This raises a lot of hair raising questions.
Had a chat with the guy and he pointed that since the nineties the thing has probably never been changed to something more law-compliant.
The continuous cicle of power heat plus some irresponsible previous renter (hair raising stories that somehow only come up now? ) make me believe the thing was over stressed and probably less than amazingly installed in the first place.
Since the burned part is the one going to the house outlets from the main incomer the technician said there’s little problems in the house per se- just the soldering of the wire that was poor and got progressively thinner therefore worsening the heat build up - which ruined the soldering - which build up heat - which ruined… You get the jist of it, right?
So yeah. I was assured the new system is better and more accurately fit.
I’m posting a picture…
One of the main phase terminal (this is from electrical control cabinet) was heat up so badly that it melted the plastic cover and caused short circuit with the neighbouring phase. Of course fuses (63A) on shorted phases worked as advertised so the fire was prevented, but still had to replace three terminals, and damaged wires which isolation was basically melted off on the lenght of 10 cm.
The cause of this was most likely loosened clamp in L2 phase terminal which which lead to heat increase. After fixing this mess I checked the terminal joint temps with a FLIR camera under load and it was fine - below 30°C. It could be faulty assembly by the guy who wired the cabinet.
The lesson here is to apply enough torque while screwing the clamps.
This looks like RCD (Residual Current Device/Circuit Breaker). The worst part after inspecting that photo is that it shouldn’t be soldered. It clearly has screw terminals on top and bottom right. Someone did poor-man-fixing on this.
Komemiute - you better check the rest of your house wiring.
Oh yeah, it is Christmas time - time to plug in 14 Christmas light strands into the same outlet.
I was fixing a neighbors panel to add a breaker so two wires into one breaker could be separated. Had my phone in my shirt pocket on vibrate. My wife called right as I stuck the screwdriver on the terminal…
Glad your electrical issue was not any worse Komi!
Use LED’s. You’ll be good to go (lower current draw in general), or get an inverter plugged into a receptacle, and run your LED strands from there, if you can find them without an upstream driver. This is what I’m planing on doing next week.
