That's the conclusion I've come to. I should photograph some of this stuff and post it to show just how old it is. IN34 diodes as thick as pencils with paper tubes and big end caps. What hurts the most is to ditch all that stuff and then, the next week, realize what you had thrown out last week would be all you needed to repair a current problem.
I just finished taking apart the last of the big DC250 tape cartridges (that's 250MB - can't back up much today with that!) to recover the nice big thick aluminum plate that they're made with. Makes great heat sink material.
Well, thanks anyway for the remote post-mortem. Always good to know what's up when something fails.
That's bound to have an effect on the post-mortem analysis. Is it possible it got fried in a surge and what you smelled was "reheated leftovers?" At least when that happens you can say to yourself: "Now it's REALLY dead." Sometime's that a good thing because it keeps you from wasting time trying to track down a problem that can't be readily solved.
Bugs still get my vote when it comes to getting in where they don't belong and causing the failure of outside equipment. I even had wasps "extend" the engine of my Volvo 142. The began building their mud nest by following the contours of the front of the engine block, which they did with remarkable detail. When I opened the hood of this very rarely used vehicle it looked like the front of the engine was made out of mud.
Now I agree that an old 4 cylinder Volvo engine is pretty damn easy for bugs to access - a lot easier than an external GFCI - but it still impresses me to this day how they just took a human fabrication and extended it. It took a while to figure out what happened because my first thought was "how did all that mud get on the engine." And then "how did it get so precisely patterned? And finally, HOLY GOD THERE ARE WASPS FLYING OUT IT AND RIGHT TOWARDS ME!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mine were, but as I noted, outdoor boxes (and outlets) vary greatly in their protection against intrusion and most will allow intrusion in a strong rain if there's anything plugged into the outlet.
That's surprising. From what I've read about GFCI's they operate electrically and not mechanically which is what IMHO a spring implies. I always *hated* it when springs went a poppin' when trying to repair something, especially something that you didn't expect to be spring loaded.
Then there's always the repair that somehow winds up with a screw left over. I don't feel as bad about that since God/Nature has the same problem with leftover parts:
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"A dermoid cyst is a teratoma of a cystic nature that contains an array of developmentally mature, solid tissues. It frequently consists of skin, hair follicles, and sweat glands, while other commonly found components include clumps of long hair, pockets of sebum, blood, fat, bone, nails, teeth, eyes, cartilage, and thyroid tissue." . . . "Such is the case of Canadian Football League linebacker Tyrone Jones, whose teratoma was discovered when he blew a tooth out of his nose."
Ditto. Places like Amazon have had a pretty serious effect on local small parts vendors in my area. They are even implicated in the recent business troubles of Radio Shack.
The retail price range of your external GFCI is pretty impressive though.
companies that specialize in breakers. There were four. But calling all
Ever get locked out? I think there's only one locksmith in the area and he lists under 20 different names. A real giveaway in the Yellow Pages listings is the lack of a mailing/street address.
As far as I know, the actual disconnecting of the power inside a gfci is do ne by an old-fashioned relay. The semiconductors are use to sense an imbal ance between the two wire circuits/conductors that go thru the gfci, and th en to cause a relay to open the circuit if the unbalance exceeds a certain limit.
ker to be a GFCI. You can put in a regular breaker and change the load bre akers to GFCI or change the outlet(s) to GFCI.
ture is causing a ground fault. My guess though is a bad GFCI breaker.
IDK what all that breaker powers, but since it's for a pool sub panel and it's 50A, it sounds like it's probably a main breaker in the subpanel. If so, it would provide the GFCI protection for everything at the pool. Without it, he'd need a GFCI breaker for the pump, a GFCI breaker for lights, a GFCI breaker or GFCI receptacles, etc. One versus two or more...
There's also the remote possibility that whatever killed the first unit was external and it's preparing to kill the replacement. (-: Let's hope that's not the case for you, but I always worry that can happen. I had a PC motherboard that fried two video cards in row before I decided to scrap it and not immolate a third video card. It was one of the early high-powered AGP video cards that apparently weren't all cross-compatible with certain motherboard AGP connector revisions.
The bottom line was that the environment was the killer, not something inherently wrong with the device that kept failing.
Bobby, I agree with you that the environment is the killer. I have experie nced many failures of circuit breakers that are located outside. Not just GFCI breakers, but also main and branch circuit breakers. I think that ther e needs to be a standard and a rating for circuit breakers that will be out side.
There isn't? There are so many electrical standards it's hard to believe but I guess the attitude is "stick it in a weatherproof box and it will be fine." I wonder what part of these devices is most vulnerable to temperature and humidity swings?
My exterior experience with devices is mostly CCTV cams and wireless sensors for thermometer and alarm systems. Some of those have been going strong for
20 years, others fail in a few months. Only a few have mechanical subsystems that are probably overdue for inspection. (The last time I checked my external CFLs all sorts of things have moved into the fixture that's now just warm enough to be the perfect flying insect incubator. There was insect silk all in the inside spiral of the CFL bulb.
We'll probably know fairly soon if some *new* external force is Steve's problem. In addition to the variations in heat and humidity that occur outside, there are insects, critters, floodicng and all sort of other problems that interior equipment never has to face. Maybe the manufacturer heavied up some known point of failure. If so, his new breaker could easily last just as long as his old one, though.
I'm surprised there's no standard for outdoor gear. I know that CCTV cameras have to meet some pretty stringent standards to be rated as weatherproof. I know that there are a number of classifications depending on what severity of weather they're built to resist.
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(Great reading for anyone interested in testing and certification)
Covers everything from
1 Dripping water Dripping water (vertically falling drops) shall have no harmful effect. Test duration: 10 minutes Water equivalent to 1 mm rainfall per minute ...
4 Splashing of water Water splashing against the enclosure from any direction shall have no harmful effect. Test duration: 5 minutes Water volume: 10 litres per minute Pressure: 80-100 kPa ...
8 Immersion beyond 1 m The equipment is suitable for continuous immersion in water under conditions which shall be specified by the manufacturer. However, with certain types of equipment, it can mean that water can enter but only in such a manner that it produces no harmful effects. Test duration: continuous immersion in water Depth specified by manufacturer, generally up to 3 m 9K Powerful high temperature water jets Protected against close-range high pressure, high temperature spray downs.
I had no idea until now how many specific levels of weather protection there are for electrical gear.
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