Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 at 17:30:32 :
In Reply to: Ha!.... posted by MoparNorm on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 at 16:50:24 :
My favorite, of all the messes I untangled in my building after I bought it (and plenty more to go), was where somebody wired a dryer outlet into one of the Zinsco panels. The fact that the wire was supported by various pipes and other wires on its way to the outlet, which was just hanging from the ceiling, isn't surprising. We've all seen wire run long distances with no staples holding it to anything. In this case, however, the "electrician" apparently didn't want to buy another expensive Zinsco breaker, so he just loosened the screws where the leads from the meter go into the main breaker, stuck the ends of his #10 romex into the holes, and tightened the screws down onto the combination. There's typically no breaker on the utility company's end downstream of the distribution transformer, and the big fuses on the 12kV side wouldn't even notice a short on a #10 wire inside a building somewhere. If that dryer outlet had shorted out, the #10 wire between it and Grand Coulee would have turned into one big long glowing fuse. Since I didn't want to have the utility shut off the power to the building to fix this problem, believe me I was VERY careful when I loosened the screws and pulled that #10 wire out.
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