Hi, I'm a student about to graduate with my associates in Electrical Tech. Every friday our class spends an hour looking at the pictures posted in this forum, they teach us alot about what not to do!! anyway thanks for all the informative pictues
I am including a picture I took of a receptacle that is in our Code classroom, the same room we look at the pictures in! lol as you can see there is no cover plate and the entire top half of the receptacle is busted off.
OK, open mouth, insert foot. I'm going to guess that that cover was compression molded, probably of phenolic. The compression stuff is more brittle than the injection molded, and maybe the cure portion of the mold cycle or temp or both were a little off. So along comes Mr. Maintenance with a vacuum or a polisher, and when he's well away from the receptacle, he yanks out the cord. Do that with the lower outlet, and you tend to break the bottom of the ground pin hole out (like here). Do it on the top outlet, and, CRACK! Off comes half the cover.
Isn't it embarassing for the school to have something like this in a CODE classroom?
I hate to think how often I have seen receptacles like this. Wouldn't you think the liability alone would move property owners to have something like this fixed?
Just by the by, I find it interesting that this unit uses the T-slot contact terminal assembly on the hot side as well. I suspect you could slam a 240v plug through that plastic if you tried. Not that anyone does things like that...
The T-slot innards allows one piece to be used for both the hot and neutral side on the entire family of receptacles (5-15, 5-20, 6-15, 6-20).
Yeah because some of the manufactering do that to keep the tooling cost down.
myself i did see few busted 240 volt verison of it as well and they will make pretty nice firework as well
but the biggest thing that some area just dont bother to change it unless someone tell the mantaince personalle to fix it or change it.
I did see that few time in school building and have to fix it and end up using very hevey duty grade repecale to prevent anymore damage but it will happend sooner or later.
Merci , Marc
Pas de problme,il marche n'est-ce pas?"(No problem, it works doesn't it?)
Reminds me of the technical school I attended until last year... once a receptacle started pulling out of the wall (pretty common here since more often than not receptacles here are only fastened using claws that spread against the wall of the box and if the plastic box isn't all surrounded by plaster the box expands under the pressure of the claws...)... one day the receptacle was gone (backstabbed of course) and only the bare live wires were hanging out of the wall... 230V to ground. Stayed that way for about a week until it got fixed. Don't like the thought of something like that around nosy and potentially stupid 14-year-olds...
The worst example of this I ever saw was in a university classroom. It was a floor receptacle, brass trim, cover flap long gone, full of crud of course. One of the students was walking around with bare feet. I was just there to give a lecture, but I put my plug tester in there and of course it lit up.
T-slot contacts hold better, I have found. I have an antique Hubbell t-slot Edison base adapter. It holds plugs better than most of the garbage found today. Of course it may well date to the era when receptacles were a rarity, and you needed a base adapter if you wanted to plug anything in.
Re: Classroom Violation
[Re: yaktx]
#162904 04/27/0708:54 AM04/27/0708:54 AM
I was in one of our lecture classrooms the other day, where they've got outlets underneath the deskts for laptops, etc. Went to plug mine in, and noticed that the faceplate on the outlet was missing. Wonder how many people have gone fishing with their hands to find the outlet, and gotten a surprise. There's enough room in the box, for your finger to slip in and make contact with one of the live screws.
Got a plug like that at work. Worst case I've seen. Outlet is outside, Outdoor cover and seal long gone, Next to a customer entrance, where little tykes go by poking, Half the outlet is busted right off. And to top it off it was a Slater too O_O. Trying to convince the boss to let me fix it...for two weeks!
A bit of an update on my last post, of the outside outlet missing pieces at my (former): -Yes the outlet is still there, -There is still no outdoor faceplate on it (no plate at all) -Yes the damaged outlet is still present, exposed to the elements. -Yes I will try to send in a pic when I go back there
On a related note, my local church had an open house to show off the renovated school. They painted the walls, installed whiteboards, and things like that. But I noticed a missing coverplate for a light switch in the 2nd grade classroom... Mentioned to the teacher that she ought to get maintenance to take care of that before some kid finds the powerline...
Re: Classroom Violation
[Re: Admin]
#203646 10/17/1109:39 AM10/17/1109:39 AM