![]() ![]() ![]() But an unseen fire may already be building beyond the outlet.Įven worse, electrical fires can be particularly tricky to put out. It's easy for a homeowner who has turned off the power to a burning socket to think that they've taken care of the problem. Here we arrive at one of the problems with electrical fires: By the time you see smoke coming out of your outlet, a fire has most likely already begun and is spreading out of sight within your walls and up to your attic. Inside a house in the winter months, the relative humidity within the walls can drop to that of the average desert, turning studs - wooden wall supports - into kindling, easily ignited by an arcing current. That's more than enough to ignite wood or old insulation under normal circumstances, but winter weather is less humid than in the summer. Once that wiring is loose, the electricity can arc, with a heat output reaching 1,500 to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Waste heat generated by the electrical current can cause wiring hidden within a home's walls to expand and contract, eventually loosening it. Coupled with a faulty circuit breaker, this overload can cause the products to overheat and possibly catch fire.īut it's even more likely that a fire will occur in a place you can't easily see. Devices like these may overload a circuit, especially one that's already reaching its maximum amperage allowance. Electrical devices that are built to put out heat, like space heaters and hair dryers, tend to use more power than other devices. This means that you don't necessarily have to overload a single outlet to cause a fire. Įven certified products can cause an overload. If you wander back to your circuit breakers or fuse box, you may see a single circuit labeled "Dining Room" or " A/C unit and Washer/ Dryer." You may find that all of the outlets in an entire room are connected to a single circuit. Another potential hazard occurs when more than one outlet is wired to a single circuit. But circuit breakers and fuses aren't always reliable. If too much current is drawn from the circuit, the circuit breaker trips or the fuse blows, breaking the circuit to prevent an overload. Most circuit breakers and fuses regulate at either 15 or 20 amps. This current is expressed in amperes, or amps. They regulate the amount of current - the volume of electrons moving through a conductor, such as an electrical cord - which can be drawn from a circuit. Somewhere in your house, you'll find a wall-mounted box, containing either circuit breakers or fuses (found in older homes).Ĭircuit breakers and fuses act as failsafes against electrical overload. At any given moment, the average American house has 120 volts of electricity flowing though it. To figure out how many things you can plug into an outlet before it will catch fire, first we need to get to the heart of how electricity works.
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