jimmci9 #2
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 09, 2006 - 9:11 pm: | |
what do these 3 things have in common???? electrical shorts.!!!.... memorial day weekend, victoria texas had over 10" of rain... and my holiday rambler suffered a leak around 1 of the side windows... after it had rained about 3-4 inches, all the outside critters started moving in... mice, ants especially....i was gone for the weekend and didn't notice the wet walls... but tuesday after the holiday, it started raining again....went to work as usual, and came home to find my electricity off... called the power company, no reported outages... started checking breakers, and found the main and living area breaker tripped... re-set it and heard a loud sizzling noise and smell smoke and burning plastic... breaker tripped immeaditely....after i figured out the breakers were doing their correct thing , i re-routed appliances to work on temporary extension cords....i found that the radio shak lighting protector/surge suppressor had shorted out in the duplex plug-in.... it was full of fried ants!!!.... guess enough of them crawled into the wall socket and made contact between the poles of the plug.. and shorted it out....i was very lucky that the breakers tripped properly and very little damage was done... only a melted plug.... but this is something that needs to addressed to all the full-timers that park for an extended time... think about ways to keep insects out....i've seen clumps of fire-ants short out irrigation pump controls, but had never seen it inside a hose.... let's be careful out there!!!!!! |
david anderson (Davidanderson)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 09, 2006 - 9:43 pm: | |
Ah Jim, ain't Texas great. Fire ants just love to kamakazee themselves in electrical boxes and circuits. I had some fry up some contactors in some air conditioning at my business a few times. The HVAC guy told me if you can ever get spiders to live around you electric boxes, don't chase them off. He claimed they are great fire ant repellents.
Go figure.
David |