Assuming 30 amp is the proper size breaker (almost all home hot water heaters

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All I know is when I was a kid our neighbor's house burned down

May 16, 2024, 8:24 AM

Now our neighbor was a contractor and architect. He actually built his own house, and my parents' house next door too. Same electrician/electrical company in 1978? wired both houses. His house burned one night, to the ground. Complete loss. horrible fire. It started in the middle of the lower part of the house, worst possible place. We slept through it. They were at Disney World on vacation at the time, otherwise someone could have died.

They had engineers come out and inspect the damage to locate the cause/source, and my dad got to talk to them. The source of the fire was in the crawlspace underneath the floor in the middle of the house. A wire was tacked to a floor joist and that wire had a short due to the connector where it was tacked to the joist, which heated up and eventually, over years, started a fire. Neighbors never had issues with that circuit breaker either. Never tripped. And it never tripped when the fire started.

We had our wiring inspected after this fire and they found two tacks that were shorting that caused burn marks on our floor joists. We had all the tacking replaced, but we never could tear out all the walls to replace the tacking in the wall studs. Just the attic, crawlspace, and everywhere they could access.

But this seems to lend credence to heat not tripping the fuse. It has to be a major voltage change.

Side note.....My parents built a pool in 1985 (same house). In doing that they had to reroute the main electrical line from the SCE&G pole in the backyard, to the house. They ran it along the base of a retaining wall they built for the pool. From 1985 to 1998 they went through 5 AC compressors on their HVAC (all covered by warranties). The HVAC company finally sent an engineer or someone who took measurements and learned we did not have consistent voltage in the lines to the HVAC, and the voltage fluctuations were killing the HVAC compressors, AND this was for the entire house as well, explaining three deaded computers, and a TV as well. So SCE&G came out, and dug up and replaced the entire line from the pole to the house, and found two places where the line sheathing was torn, moisture had entered, and there was a big calcified white chunk of crud on the wire at both places.

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Electrical bros - this is a test. This is only a test.

At least tag the man

#10 AWG solid***

Yup, what Flow said. If you're more than 150' from the panelboard

Sounds like you just need a good pair of

Geez

I've got a laundry hamper in my garage full of the exact gauge you need.***

10***

Anything smaller will burn the wire and NOT trip the breaker and is

It could, but not necessarily. A 12 gauge wire won't immediately blaze up if

You're arguing with a licensed electrical engineer...

Interesting. I always assumed the actual heat from an overheated wire would

All I know is when I was a kid our neighbor's house burned down

I can guarantee you those new arc fault and gfci breakers will trip

Yep. Didn't have those in 1978.***

Yep - and I apologize for derailing this conversation with bad information.

Here is a great online calculator to account for voltage drop and determine

Re: Electrical bros - this is a test. This is only a test.

#10***

7.

Residential, I'd use a #10***

6. and leave a good 100 feet rolled up in case you ever want to move it***

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