| Hi everyone!
In the spirit of Halloween, I decided it was prime time to share some electrical “horror stories” of mine. These are ones that I have experienced first-hand, and some were even a bit scary, to be honest. With that said, enjoy!
My first, and best electrical “horror story” I have is from when we were staying at an old, and not very well-maintained house we rented for vacation back in December of 2014. The place was kind of a dump, and was likely built sometime in the 1970s. Anyways, we first knew something wasn’t right when we were running a space heater (as the house had no central heating and the baseboard heaters weren’t worth anything), and ALL of the outlets in the room got hot! We thought this was going to cause the place to burn down! And, at other times, when running high-current appliances on a different circuit in the home, it would sometimes cause the lights to shut off and then come back on by themselves! I’m guessing there was a bad connection somewhere, paired with a bad electrical panel (it was a Zinsco panel, which, for those who don’t already know, were some of the worst ever made!) Needless to say, this made it a bit scary to stay there, let alone get a good nights’ sleep! It just felt like one big electrical fire waiting to happen!
The second one I have is from when I was a very little kid. One night, we smelled something burning coming from the attic when the hallway lights were turned on! At first, we didn’t know where the smell was coming from, but we were later able to trace the smell and realized that there was a correlation between the running of the hallway lights and the somewhat strong electrical burning smell. This issue has since been long fixed, but I’m actually still not quite sure as to what the reason for this was. I’m wondering if perhaps there was a loose connection of some sort, or perhaps an arcing connection. What is odd to me, however, is that there was never any flickering of the lights. For some reason, I had just assumed that if there were loose or intermittent connections that were resulting in overheating, they would cause flickering. But, it didn’t, thereby making things even more “mysterious.” I’m guessing it may have been one of those “high-resistance” types of connections.
I would love to hear if anything has something they’d like to share on this subject!
|
