I was having some difficulty getting a good tight fitting of some terminal strips and when I examined them I realised why.
Now I'm wondering where else in the house they're lurking ...
No wonder there are electrical fires.
Owain
I recently discovered Wago connectors. So far they seem pretty good.
I managed to over-tighten screw on an MK socket, which stripped the screw. When I made a warranty claim, they did not dispute it. Surely a screw should be close to indestructible?
Well hopefully they are accessible so the smoke might attract your attention.
OTOH, there's no knowing what a previous owner has done.
Were they contained inside a box of some sort ?.
I was trying to put them in a box, yes. These were new terminal strips which I think I bought a couple of years ago, although I can't find the original details, and was fitting today. I know I bought a bulk load of them in various sizes in preparation for rewiring.
Owain
Where did you buy them?
I'd expect the head of the screw to become chewed up long before the housing split.
Does accessible imply no effective smoke barrier? I'm not convinced.
I've had exactly the same thing.
Bill
Don't be silly, they are easy to strip with all that mechanical advantage they offer.
Screw terminals as crude as terminal strips should be banned.
Any good screw termination would have a little "tongue" under the screw to make contact with the wire not some rough finished screw.
Screws tend to be made out of fairly hard materials like brass or steel.
The housings could be made of anything like copper or brass.
The metal block used to be solid brass (or nickel alloy?) in a rectangular section, now it's extruded in that keyhole shape to save metal and machining - I imagine if the extrusion isn't done at the right speed/temperature or there are inclusions then that's the place it's going to fail. I wonder if the screws are brassed steel these days, rather than proper brass.
I estimate it's considerably less than 1 mm at the thinnest place.
Some of them were slightly magnetic, so probably.
Owain
I don't know. I can't find a record of an online purchase, so I wonder if it was Wickes?
Owain
Good call. Also some brasses can suffer from stress corrosion cracking. This might be "out of spec" brass.
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