We turned out to a fire call this afternoon.
The call came through as a House fire.
When we got there there was nothing showing, as in no smoke or flames.
Upon walking in through the front door you could smell it.
What is it?.
Ozone.
It really gets up your nose.
Turn off the power to the place.
Go to the switch-board, point the fire extinguisher at it and open it, fill it with CO2.
Then tighten the Neutrals.
Good thing this happened in the daytime.
Electricians that can't tighten a simple screw, need to find another career.
This really peeves me, such a simple thing can cause so many problems.

Ah..... Ozone!

I smell it more out of the back of TV sets when the EHT has been arcing at the CRT connector or the LOPT. In a darkened room you can see the lovely blue-ish corona discharge too.

The smell also hangs around in parts of the London Underground, particularly on sections where sparking at the conductor rail is prevalent due to the track layout. Always takes me back to riding the trains as a kid!

Smells I like;
Bacon frying on a Sunday morning as I'm in the shower; Curry, (in fact all spices); Woodsmoke; The seaside (seaweed); Fresh cotton sheets; Cedarwood.
I'm not so keen on;
French BO (phew!); cheap perfume; anmmonia; cabbage cooking; dung-spreading time; Testosterone-stench at the gym, and (ugghhh!) figs!.

Alan

Nothing like the smell of overheated electrics to give one a start.

Some years back, I visited a client in the Sunset-Vine Tower in Hollywood. Upon boarding the elevator, the smell of hot switchgear just about knocked me out.

A few years later, the building suffered total power loss as the switchgear let go and set thier main transformer on fire. After attempting a patch-bodge job on the switchgear and replacing the transformer, they powered it up again. Result? Another transformer explosion, this time taking out two square blocks of other customers.

The place was abandoned for several years until the entire electrical system was replaced.

I almost felt sorry for the poor fools who had to clean out the refrigerators and freezers of the restaurant on the top floor (After sitting with no power for almost a year!)

Ugh!

As a Fire-fighter, my nose has become attuned to the smell of different things burning.
I can instantly recognise the substance down to a tee.
Alan,
I must say that Cedarwood is one of my favourite smells!.
Bacon cooking is pretty much up there too!.

Smell of burning underground cables.

I do a lot of fault finding on LV and HV cables, when the crews dig up the fault then the "aroma" of hot pvc, copper, and xlpe etc. tells you JACKPOT and a succesfull fault location.

Yeah,
I agree Ray, I've been part of cable fault locations in the past and it's amazing how much heat can be produced.
The Maori part of me would tell me that having all that heat in the ground, in the one spot, would suggest it's time for a Hangi!.

{BTW, a hangi is a in-ground oven, heated with pre-heated rocks}




[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 12-23-2005).]

> Electricians that can't tighten a simple
> screw, need to find another career

Don't be so quick to blame the electrician. The electricity itself can cause terminals to come loose. It's common practice with factories and high-rise building to shut everything down once a year so that all the electrical connections can be checked and tightened.
Also here years ago it was thought to be good practice to solder a wire before putting it in a screw terminal. It was a while before someone finally realized that the solder slowly deforms away from under the screw so it is actually a good way of ensuring that you eventually end up with a bad connection. I've fixed a number of these bad connections caused by electricians who believed at the time that they were doing the right thing.
Another problem is the type of terminals now used on most circuit breakers. If you accidently stick the wire in behind the terminal it will feel like the terminal is tight and the wire secure but a day or 2 later you will have a loose connection. It's very easy to accidently do when you don't have a good view of the terminal.

I was at a friend's house a couple of weeks ago and he had one of the home shopping channels on, which at the time was plugging a "household DIY kit." (Isn't it amazing how these stations can spend an entire hour praising a simple piece of equipment? "Here we have a small screwdriver, which you will find very useful around the house for tightening small screws. There's also a larger screwdriver which you might need for, er, larger screws..... )

Anyway, this particvular kit included a small rechargeable soldering iron. One of the suggested uses was to use it to tin the wires before tightening into the terminals of a 13A plug -- "To get that professional look."


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 12-30-2005).]

I saw a guy in an electrical shop in Cork spending >€100 on 3 IEC power cables with sheilded cables for his sensitive audio equipment.

I asked him did he also intend to sheild the entire supply cable back to the xformer and perhaps from there back to the powerstation?

.... people sometimes make me wonder if they should be allowed to wire anything! Never mind tinning the cables for that professional look. Also, you'd want to be careful when suggesting "tinning" anything in Cork, it could be misinterpreted as "thinning" with warm and sparky results!

Watered down Guinness? Wouldn't that be enough to start another revolution there?

In the British "Television" magazine; formerly "Practical Television", only a few years ago the loose screw topic was discussed. When a set was brought in for repair and the (UK 13A) plug was checked for correct fuse and wiring it was often found the neutral screw was loose. Sometimes loose enough to prevent connection. The mystery was never officially solved; the closest plausible explanation was that the neutral pin was free to move about as the plug was inserted and withdrawn from the socket. The live pin wasn't as it was riveted to the fuse holder and therefore mechanically isolated.
When I moved into my house I checked every switch and GPO and found the neutral screw in one of the kitchen GPO's had never been tightened but the fibreglass insulation in the wall had kept the wire pressed in.

Aussie, I recall that article too, I thought it seemed to be the most likely. Another that occurred to me (but wouldn't be applicable to low load appliances) would be the heating effect from the pins themselves in older sockets. The neutral pin would conduct the heat directly to the (tinned) wire, whereas the live would be thermally isolated by the fuse.

It depends upon the design of the plug. In general, the neutral pin should be held in place by the plug top, although admittedly there will be some slight movement. Some of the older designs (notably the Rolls-Royce of plugs -- MK) had the pins securely fixed to the plug anyway.




[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 01-04-2006).]

There must be something about the neutrals though. A buddy of mine on my summer job insisted in at least 75% of the spöice failures he had seen the neutral (of a single phase system) had failed and in most cases the neutral fuses blow and not the phase ones.

Perosnally I haven't experienced that many failures, regarding the fuses I can say at home usually one or the other fuse blows, without any significance. Or they blow both at once.