ECN Forum Forums Photo Discussion Forums Photos for General Discussion Found this at an estimate

Personally I am a fan of H.R. Giger.

[This message has been edited by rad74ss (edited 08-13-2005).]

I love doing jobs like this. Nothing more rewarding than completeing a service like this and making the customer beyond satisfied with the work I've done. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say, "I wish I could do a service every day of the week" because to me that's the best type of work to do.

What's wrong with it? The description says that is EXACTLY the way it was found. I really think most of those panels should have covers.
I did a rough count and got 50 fuses. A single 42 circuit box wouldn't quite replace that mess.

Uh, what is it?? o:
I've never seen that many fuses....in fact, in all my life I'd never seen more than a few in one box.

The my local Bussman (yes the fuse folks) representative REMOVED the breaker panel when he moved into his NEW house and installed a fuse panel. What does this tell you about breakers?

Anyone with an understanding of let-thought energy knows the answer. Until someone makes an affordable breaker that can open in 1/2 cycle I'd prefer to have fuses in my house too.

When the Bussman guy went to sell his house several years later he had to change it all back to breakers because the new owners could not comprehend his reasononing.

It's this microwavable, fast food world we live in; breakers are just convenient.

I've never seen a fuse fail to open.

RSlater,
RSmike

I'm partial to fuses myself. When I replaced the Federal Pacific ($%@^$) panel in my house a few years ago, I initially wanted to install a fusible panel. Due to the scarcity of them in my area, however, I could not find one of sufficient size, and I didn't want to cobble something together that looked like it had been added onto a dozen times, and went with Square D.
This is an interesting setup, nonetheless, with a lighting panel (with switches), other panels with a combination of plug fuses and cartridge fuse pullouts (one pullout appears to be missing...?). I think the nastiest thing in this picture is the J-box in the upper right corner .
Does anyone know what kind of business (?) this was found in?

Mike (mamills)

If I owned a house, I'd rather have fuses in my panel instead of circuit-breakers. With a huge main "kife switch" right after the meter to positively shut off all power to the house.

While I agree with RSmike on the advantage of fuses over circuit breakers when it comes to reliability, consider this:

Breakers prevent idiots from replacing plug fuses with coins and slugs, and also using bits of wire to bridge the clips on cartridge fuse holders.

If money were no object (hey, I can dream) and were the appropriate hardware available, I would go for a series combination of breakers and fuses, coordinated so that the breaker would trip on overloads, but the fuse would open on solid faults or breaker failures.

Fuses have benefits, but I've yet to see a GFI fuse, and overfusing because of nuisance tripping is a real danger; hardware failures are real, but human failures are even more common. With enough money, I'd want the best of both worlds.

-Jon