Dollar Store - ECN Electrical Forums

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Hey folks. Hope everything is going well for everybody.

While on duty at the FD, we got a call for a fire at a local "dollar" type store. We got there and found light smoke. Turns out the staff had (smartly) put out the fire with a portable extinguisher and the breaker had worked correctly. These pics are of the back side of a bottled water cooler - the apparent point of origin. I looks like one of two possible scenarios:

Option 1: the cooler kept getting shoved up against the wall, and the standard "business appliance" cord - a straight feed, not an angled one - couldn't take the abuse any longer and shorted out in the cord

OR

Option 2: the cord or the receptacle was no longer making proper contact, resulting in arcing, overheating, and the eventual fire.

Stay safe guys and girls!

DougW

[Linked Image from electrical-photos.com]

A similar situation occurs with some designs of large CRT computer monitors. The connections at the back of the CRT display stick out farther than the rest of the display back.

Luckily, the VGA cable is more fragile than the power cable so the missing colors or better yet, missing sync signal gets the owner's attention.

Originally Posted by hardwareguy

A similar situation occurs with some designs of large CRT computer monitors. The connections at the back of the CRT display stick out farther than the rest of the display back.

These days there's usually the molded plastic cabinet which disguises it a little, but in the old days there were some designs of TV which had a completely flat back, except for a "bowler hat" style bulge to accommodate the CRT neck and connector.

Originally Posted by hardwareguy

A similar situation occurs with some designs of large CRT computer monitors. The connections at the back of the CRT display stick out farther than the rest of the display back.

Luckily, the VGA cable is more fragile than the power cable so the missing colors or better yet, missing sync signal gets the owner's attention.

I remember having this problem with some big Sun monitors with the DB-13W3 connectors.. The darned connector and cable stuck out a good 6 inches from the back of the monitor, and it tended to mangle the internal connections in the monitor.. Why they didn't recess the connector in the underside of the monitor is beyond me.. The monitors were also very deep, so you really needed several feet behind the desk for the monitor to hang out into.