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Blew a fuse box with a loose ground wire yesterday
Was finishing up a job in a basement in Oak Park, pushed the cable through a drop ceiling, and my ground wire nicked a live conduit. The whole panel sparked and tripped the main for the whole building. Took me 45 minutes to find the short and reset everything without getting fried. Has anyone else run into a hidden live wire where you least expect it?
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elizabethhayes27d ago
Oak Park is actually known for having a lot of old knob-and-tube wiring that's been hacked together over the years. I've done a few service upgrades out there and you never know what you're going to find behind the walls. But here's the thing about your "rubber house" joke, that's not really how grounding works even if you were in a rubber box. The ground wire you mentioned nicking the conduit, that's not the same as the main bonding jumper or equipment grounding conductor. Basically you had a phase-to-ground fault because your ground wire touched a live part it shouldn't have. A rubber house would just make you float electrically but it wouldn't prevent that initial spark from happening when the energized conduit made contact. You would still have that arc flash and potential fire risk until the breaker tripped.
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the_laura1d ago
Honestly, that's just how it goes sometimes, right? @elizabethhayes nailed it with the Oak Park knob-and-tube thing. I see this pattern everywhere now, not just in old houses but in everyday stuff where people patch things together without fixing the root problem. Like, you'll see someone jerry-rig a shelf with a single loose bracket and call it good, but six months later the whole thing comes crashing down because they never addressed the wall anchor being stripped. It's the same with electrical work, you fix one loose wire but the whole system is begging for a proper upgrade.
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