Tag Archives: badness 10000

Boom! One day your plug goes boom!

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Don’t give up in gloom…

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I was pushing the plug into a socket on an extension lead and it gave a colossal flash and bang. So here’s the weird things:

  1. What the hell.
  2. No, seriously, what the hell?
  3. The extension lead was fine and appears to still work.
  4. The wiring to the wall socket was checked a couple of years ago when the electrician replaced my fuse boxes (including the wooden fusebox with asbestos lined fuse folders!) with a modern consumer unit.
  5. For those of you not familiar with British foot stabbersplugs the big pin in the front with the chunk blown out of it is the Earth pin. The plug as you 20180507_101513can see is just a simple  figure-8 adapter (Apple used to be really obnoxious and made the nonstandard, but they’ve stopped doing that now). Naturally, being a 2 pin connector, it’s not grounded so that earth pin SHOULD NOT BE CONNECTED TO ANYTHING!
  6. The pin on the upper left of the main picture with the really big chunk blown out of it and the black stuff all over it is the neutral.
  7. So I say again: WHAT THE HELL?

The event tripped the breaker but not the RCD (and not the 13A fuse in the extension lead either). I guess it’s a race to see which goes first…?

If you look closely, the live pin is not entirely unscathed. There’s definitely a little arc damage on it, though I don’t know if that was from the event or just regular use. You see on the live and neutral, there’s little bits of arc damage on/near the top. This is where the pins contact, so that may be from regular use.

Which made me think: the arc happened when the plug was already substantially inserted (you can see the damage is well down from the top) which means that the wipers were making good contact.

So, in conclusion:29sdew