So today I almost burned a house down. How about you? · 2:38am Nov 19th, 2016
My wife and I used to live rent-free in an old trailer at the back of my mother's property, and now that we've moved out, mom uses it as a bit of a storage building, but mostly just tries to keep it from rotting and collapsing. And lately, there's been no power in it. The electric company said the problem was on our end, but mom didn't know what to look for in the fuse box, so she called me. I checked it out, and all the fuses were intact, so I went outside and discovered there was a main breaker on the bottom of the electric meter, and that was kicked.
I flipped it and heard a loud "clunk" from inside the trailer.
I tried it a couple more times, and got the same thing. I thought maybe it was the 50-year-old A/C unit trying to turn on and being jammed up, so I took the front of that apart. Nothing wrong there, so I went outside and tried it again. Same thing.
I called mom over to stand inside and listen for it, and did it a couple more times. She thought it was coming from under the floor, and guessed that some of the local stray cats had torn up the wiring and caused a short.
I wanted to be sure, so I showed here where the switch was and we traded places. Now that I was inside, the noise was less a "clunk" and more a "pop", and it was definitely coming from under the old oven. I pulled it out of the way to expose the plug and had her hit it again.
Sparks shot out all around the plug.
I wrapped a blanket around my hand to avoid direct contact and unplugged it, then had her hit it again, in case the problem was with the appliance rather than the wiring.
A jet of sparks shot a few inches straight out of the outlet.
And I'd hit that thing at least a dozen times over the previous half hour.
I have a theory that I can never win anything on lotteries or scratch-offs because I blow all my luck avoiding things like accidental arson.
There's a rule in airplanes which is probably also a good rule in houses: if the breaker trips, you reset it once. If it trips again, you leave it alone because there is a serious problem and you don't want to burn anything down.
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Well, the trailer had already moved into the "slowly rot into a pile of molding particle board and tetanus-coated scrap metal" phase of its life, as old trailers do, so that would have been no real loss. Frankly, beyond a few spare furnace filters, the most valuable things in there are probably an old heat lamp base and a futon mattress missing it's cover.
So really, a "nothing of value was lost" situation.
Except for the part where I might have died.