Has anyone seen that tv commerrcial for "Life Alert", where an outlet on the wall bursts into flames? Why would an outlet suddenly burst into flames like that? There was no smoke first or anything, it just burst into flames. The flames come out from behind the cover plate too, not from the outlet itself, and there's only one thing plugged into it, not an overload. That's scarey to think that an outlet can just suddenly burst into flames.
Jim
Do you have aluminum wiring ?? This happened to me in house with AL wiring. Fire shot out the spaces between the outlet itself and the cover plate. Nothing was even plugged in. It happened when I started the microwave which is on an outlet "downstream" of the fire outlet. I learned later this can happen when the wires work loose over time. The fire outlet was above kitchen counter above the dish washer.
Hi, How can you tell it is not an overload.
It's a TV commercial! The jolly green giant isn't real nor the talking animals.
What is really scary is that in the printed information for smoke alarms, it is stated that you buy these with the written information that failure rate can be as high as 35%.
Steve
The commercial is a little over the top, but lightning can do some funny things. Lightning struck close to my house. It blew out the outlet that was nest to a bed and started the bed covers on fire. I caught it in time, so little damage was done. I also had an extention cord plugged into an out in the garage. Nothing was plugged into the extention cord. For some reason it blew the extension cord in half. It also fried the fan motor on my refrigerator.
Strange stuff for sure.
Hank
It's not natural, but for a variety of reasons, on rare occasions, catastrophic things go wrong. Today, we have Arc fault circuit breakers, designed to prevent this sort of thing from happening, and when they work, they do just that. This past Monday night, my brother in law called me and told me that an arc fault circuit breaker in his panel, burst into flames. Fortunately nothing but the breaker was damaged.
On a clear, calm day here a few years ago, a tree fell on a the power lines higher tension wires shorting them out on the household wires. The surge blew all the surge protectors in my house and there were scorch marks around a few outlets. Fortunately all we lost was a microwave oven, not on a surge protector. There was no fire but if something was flammable around the outlets, there could have been.
Agreed, I had a Dishwasher catch fire during an electrical storm, and it was running at the time. Luckily my oldest son, always the quick thinker put it out with water from the sink. We called Sears and they showed up with a new one post haste, and took the burnt one to send for inspection (more likely to get the evidence out of our hands). Baffled me how an appliance that was spraying water around could ignite, but like you say lightning behaves strangely.
You've heard of "Spontaneous Human Combustion?"
Electrical outlets DO burst into flames from any number of causes: oily rags, rodents playing with matches, etc. That's probably why electrical outlets are required to be in boxes.
However, the NEC or UL or whoever is in charge of this stuff left the front door open!
To be even more safe, switch and outlet plates should be at least as fire-retardant as the boxes and the holes in the boxes should be plugged with an inflammable substance like concrete.
Maybe teeny-tiny sprinkler systems...or Halon.
Remember that many outlets are not isolated, but are part of a chain so current may be going through the outlet even if nothing is plugged into it. If you have aluminum wire it can cause a great deal of heat and start a fire well below the rated capacity of the outlet. The same thing can happen to copper wire, but it is much less likely.
Now you have really ruined my day. :-)
Yes, we had a receptacle that was always used for the vacuum cleaner. Over the years of frequent use it failed. It sparked with seeming blue flames.
I had a stereo floor speaker ignite once. I noticed the front cover burning, so I threw the speaker out into the front yard.
I never figured out why it burst into flames - to loud???
I have seen the ad on TV, and my take is that it appeared to me that the flames suddenly arose from ignition of a flammable gas or vapor of a flammable liquid. As in my take is that the scene was staged to an extent beyond reality.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
So even if the smoke alarm is having a bad day, you are almost 3 times as likely to die without it as with it if fire strikes while you are asleep?
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
Nothing strange in your damage. The nearby lightning was a direct strike to wires inside the house. Lightning found connections to earth inside. For example, electricity was flowing from a cloud to wires inside the house. Through power cord insulation. Then to earth maybe via that concrete garage floor. Yes, concrete is a good electrical conductor which is why arcing through power cord insulation may have vaporized.
Same applies to other damage. First current was flowing everywhere in a path from that cloud through something in that bedroom. Later, a bedspread caught fire. What was that path to earth that arced; created a fire? Of course, the solution was to earth that surge before it could enter the building. An earthed connection from each wire inside each cable did not exist which is why some items were damaged.
Other reasons for outlet sparks or fire were discussed including aluminum wiring problems created by 'cold creep' or defective wiring in this picture:
My story might not be too applicable, but in 1980 I had a 1500 watt room heater plugged into a receptacle in a building built in 1930.
I had used this for several nights, maybe many, but this time, in the morning, for some reason I woke up and saw one or two inch blue flames coming from the hard rubber plug, or from the receptacle. Although continuing to lie down, I quickly spraing into action, to pull the cord out of the wall. I was reaching for the cord and the girl who was with me kept pulling my arm back, why I don't know. On my third or fourth try, she still hadn't given up, but I used more than the usual force needed to move my arm and it's good that I was stronger than she.
The plug got hot because the outlet wasn't springy anymore and didn't make good contact with the plug. The outlet had many coats of paint and I continued to use it without problem for a tv and iirc an electric blanket, but not the heater anymore.
So the arcfault breaker is there to prevent fires from arcing, and instead it catches on fire. I guess I should keep the door to my breaker box closed.
The outlet shoots flames, and so you keep using it. That doesn't sound intelligent.
And another good reason to have multiple smoke alarms (besides ensuring that they're placed in optimal locations to sound *early* for fires starting in various places). My house has 7 (1 inside and 1 outside each of 3 bedrooms, one of those doing double duty as the top of the stairs, and 1 in the garage, all tied together. I had to add a junction box in the garage anyway when doing some remodeling, and decided I liked the idea of an earlier warning that the garage is on fire, since it'd take a while for smoke to make it through the firewalls and door, and by then it might be too late for the kids room above the garage. No false alarms with that one yet). Can seem like overkill, but the code makes sense for closed bedroom doors (where the fire could start on either side), and they're cheap when doing new construction.
And testing every once in a while will help ensure that most of that
35% failure chance occurs while you're poking the "test" button, when the consequence (having to go buy a new one) is much more palatable than a middle-of-the-night failure.Josh
Hi, I have combination of dual sensor types; ionization/photo sensor, ionization/CO sensor scattered all over the house. I just replaced them all since they are ~10 years old. All are hard wired with battery back up.
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