Friday, September 25, 2009

When Electricians Get Lazy

I meant to post this earlier, but never got around to it.

A few weeks back I noticed that the metal plug in thingies for my Ipod charger were slightly askew. I assumed it was that way from the factory and didn't think too much of it.

Then came the day that I plugged it in and it sparked. That worried me enough to tell Mister C about it. He came into the kitchen and pulled it out of the socket and went "Holy Sh*(!". Huh, that's a bit extreme for a simple spark right?

He showed me the charger and said it had melted and that we needed to get it replaced. Evidently there was a recall on some of them and even though mine wasn't on the list, he was thinking it had the same problem.

Then I started looking at the outlet it had come from and noticed that it had some dark marks on it that looked a tad suspicious. So I had him look at that as well. The next thing I know, Mister C has shut off the power to that circuit and is pulling the outlet out of the wall in order to replace it. But once he got it off the wall, he realized that it was a whole lot worse than we thought.

Evidently, when the electrician had wired the outlet while the house was being built, he hadn't bothered to make sure it was done right. He had left the connection really loose. Over time, it got looser and started sparking. Inside my wall. The heat from it had burned the wire insulation back a good four inches. But scariest of all is that this particular outlet is about as far from our bedroom as possible. And fairly close to Master J's room. If this thing had started a fire at night, the odds of us realizing it in time to do something about it would almost be nil.

Thankfully for us, Papa (my dad) is an electrical genius by trade. He came over and helped Mister C fix the wiring and replace the outlet. Of course now I want Mister C to pull off and check out every outlet in the house so I can sleep better at night. So far he hasn't done it. But he will.






1 comments:

AKT said...

Thank God for the Ipod meltdown!