ECN Forum Forums Photo Discussion Forums Photos for General Discussion Water Damaged Panelboard

Aaa!

A little scraping with a metal wire brush and she'll be fine.

What I find amazing is that nothing in there tripped. They probably ran the sump pumps off electricity from that panel!

What does that tell us?
Tap water is often less conductive than you'd think!

Wow. Good point Ranger. What township/borough was this in?

Ian A.

Less conductive than many think but still plenty of conductivity to deliver a fatal shock.

man, those service conductors are freakin' DUST, that thing looks like it was just pulled up from the Titanic!

Electrolysis at work, baby! Look at that neutral.

I'm still amazed that nothing tripped, that water would have needed an impedence of better than sixteen ohms to avoid tripping out a 15A breaker on a leg-to-leg fault. Given all the contaminants that I'm sure were floating around in it, I'm amazed it was that resistive.

Maybe the water itself kept the breakers from operating? The cooling would mess up the thermal characteristics and the water itself would foul the mechanism?

On a side note, can you imagine coming home and opening your basement door to find water lapping at the top step? That must've been horrifying.

-John

'Kid, this is in Bensalem.

To some extent I can... About 1 1/2 years ago I came home to a sound of heavily running water. When I went down into the dark basement fumbling for the light switch I thought: "What's that weird feeling around my shoes???" Looked down to realize I was wading in almost 2 inches of water...

Some ingenious kid had turned on the sink at full blast, filling it with more water than the drain could take... go figure. Took three of us more than half an hour with buckets and shovels.