ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Control transformer - burn up from excess current?

My guess is that the original installation that drew 0.4 Amps at 120V (48VA) is what the 60 VA CPT was sized for.
Someone one day decided to add a power feed to another controller and grossly overloaded the 60 VA CPT and it just finally got fed up with the mistreatment and gave up the ghost.

I refer to this syndrome as "The Bob Vila Approach" since someone who knows very little about electricity just looks for the nearest, cheapest, simplest place to get 120V from and assumes that the available power at that point is infinite.

I actually had an owner tell me that I should just tap the 30A receptacle circuit to get the 100A feed that I needed for a new panelboard...priceless.