Irrelevant, it did it in a few sockets, one of them pretty new.
This one fitted in tightly enough.
Aren't they supposed to be made of self extinguishing material?
Why on earth would she try to stop you stopping a fire?
I'm just surprised it doesn't burn away. I guess "burning" is oxidation, which is the wrong direction.
Yes I probably will.
I wonder if that's how someone managed to melt a 4-way extension by running 2 tumble dryers and 2 washing machines through it. I always assumed it was just a shit fuse that didn't protect it from overload. Maybe one or more of the plugs, being in a damp room, had tarnishing and heating the extension.
Bruce Farquhar posted for all of us...
Arlen, this is right in your bailiwick. Teach him electricity.
I have a degree in electronics you condescending little shit.
Bruce Farquhar posted for all of us...
What degree? 98.6F ?
That level of precision is insane, since the human body temperature varies by about +/-1C.
Why don't you replace all your plugs with gold plated mains plugs like these:-
Thinking about it you probably need to replace the mains lead on your heater. One of these seems quite suitable - just cut the plug off the other end and replace.
I hate to ask but is this a single phase or 2-phase fanheater?
And that is sufficient justification for one decimal place in expressing the average/median, whichever it is. Actually a precision of about a quarter of a Fahrenheit degree would probably be sufficient, but is hard to express in our number writing system.
UK fan heaters are all single phase. (or just possibly three phase in an industrial context.) No 120V mains supplies.
When something varies by 3.6 you don't quote it with a decimal place. Imagine you had a dodgy analogue meter which had a shaky needle. The readout varied between 52 and 55.6. You wouldn't read it as 53.8 would you? That implies some accuracy. Saying we're 98.6 will make some people think they're ill when they read 99.
Why would that make a difference? And anyway it's not really 2 phase in our US home. It's single phase, split.
We can be thankful for a lot less wiring.
Sounds a bit overkill, I'll just make sure high current devices get polished if the prongs aren't shiny.
The lead is fine. It's not overheating now I cleaned the prongs.
I've done that before now with the plug for a 3-bar (3 kW) electric fire, when I smelled the plastic of the plug getting a bit hot. The live pin was actually too hot to touch (*). I removed the plug, took out all the pins (having dropped the live one in cold water to cool it down!) and used fine sandpaper on a flat surface to polish the four sides of each pin until they were shiny.
If I see a high-current device with a removable plug that has oxidised pins, I remove them and give them the sandpaper treatment. Sadly you can't do that with moulded-on plugs, and trying to polish them in situ is very hard.
(*) I think the screw that attached the wire to the pin may have been a bit slack, so there may have been a bit of contact resistance there as well. I always check that the exposed bit of wire that goes into the screw hole seems to have about the right thickness of strands and some haven't broken off - assuming it's stranded rather than solid wire.
Get a fibre glass pencil. Handy for oxidised battery contacts too. I polished my heater's prongs without removing them.
They actually use brass. But the contacts are designed to be self cleaning but are not always as bright as they might be. By far the most common cause of a hot plug is actually a loose wire inside it.
However, at this time of year when elderly relatives are running 3kW fan heaters full bore that have stood idle for the best part of a year it is worth keeping an eye out for plugs that get mad hot.
3kW on a kettle isn't too bad since the load only persists for a couple of minutes but a 3kW fan heater on in a cold room could run for a couple of hours before it first cuts out. Plenty of time for any weak connection in the plug or socket to get mad hot. You know you have a very serious problem when one or other starts to melt or char.Plugs on powerful heaters need to be checked periodically because you are running them very close to their design limits and things can gradually work loose over time.
ISTR that the recommended maximum load for portable appliances has been dropped to 2.4kW in the not so recent past but there are plenty of 3kW fan heaters still around especially in the homes of elderly people.
My 2 pennorth... I understood the socket contacts are a hardenable alloy. Beryllium/Copper? and that excess heat (poor contact/high current) anneals them back to soft, leading to further poor contact issues.
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