Zinsco circuit breakers

[pishta]

I have no advice other than to urge you to put things aside and get this done. In my HVAC days I've seen a few of the infamous "something Pacific" boxes were absolute junk. But the worst was one of the boss's sons, young, married, kid, who bought a decent manufactured home, all electric. "Something wasn't working" on his "about a year old" place so I went over there. Some of the large breakers (electric furnace/ dryer/ range / etc) were not making good contact on the buss bar and were heating up and losing contact. I don't remember what brand the thing was, but his dad gave him a kick and he had it pulled out of there.

**** LIKE THIS SHOULD BE A LAWSUIT on the jerks who designed and manufactured it.

We were at a party over the weekend and lady asked me to look at something for her in the fuse box (ha, of all people!) she tells me this breaker was sparking and buzzing. Turns out it was a Siemens QT 4-20 plug in that wasn't even mounted under the clip, It was just pushed onto the buss bar and buzzing away! The lady had already taken the dead front off and was showing my how she could just pull the quad breaker off the main buss, and she does! I'm like "stop, please dont do that, your going to kill yourself!" I looked at it when she handed it to me with its 12g wires still in it and the slots the buss rails fit into were cracked and burned. Told her it needed to be replaced as there was no retention mechanism left in (small spring wire broke out of it and was laying on the bottom of the can) and turn the 200A main breaker off if you do anything in here (its a new remodel and the panel is only 1.5 years old. I think the guy installed refurb or used breakers. They were discontinued Murrays but Siemens now took that line over and Home Depot didnt stock it (4X20 with the center 2 under a common clip) but could get it special order.

I remedied my problem by plugging the A/C unit into an outlet in the heater closet, thats on its own circuit as the centreal heating wont be used for a good while. LA county registered its hottest day in history saturday in Woodland Hills, 121F. That's smokin......

 

[rustycowll69]

We were at a party over the weekend and lady asked me to look at something for her in the fuse box (ha, of all people!) she tells me this breaker was sparking and buzzing. Turns out it was a Siemens QT 4-20 plug in that wasn't even mounted under the clip, It was just pushed onto the buss bar and buzzing away! The lady had already taken the dead front off and was showing my how she could just pull the quad breaker off the main buss, and she does! I'm like "stop, please dont do that, your going to kill yourself!" I looked at it when she handed it to me with its 12g wires still in it and the slots the buss rails fit into were cracked and burned. Told her it needed to be replaced as there was no retention mechanism left in (small spring wire broke out of it and was laying on the bottom of the can) and turn the 200A main breaker off if you do anything in here (its a new remodel and the panel is only 1.5 years old. I think the guy installed refurb or used breakers. They were discontinued Murrays but Siemens now took that line over and Home Depot didnt stock it (4X20 with the center 2 under a common clip) but could get it special order.

I remedied my problem by plugging the A/C unit into an outlet in the heater closet, thats on its own circuit as the centreal heating wont be used for a good while. LA county registered its hottest day in history saturday in Woodland Hills, 121F. That's smokin......

I heard that 121degree temp on the TV, but wasn't paying close attention. So that was for real? damn, that's HOT.

 

[YY1]

Your original post asked if zinsco's were a time bomb.

Several people including myself have answered your question.

YES, they are.

Please budget to replace that panel ASAP.

 

[67Dart273]

I've never understood, with the fairly high percentage of fires caused by electrical systems, why this country cannot put some "teeth" into device design and quality. Another HUGE issue for me were the spring loaded "screwless" outlet/ switch terminals. I got caught with a problem with these long after I "thought" they had been outlawed..........

When working for the Motorola shop in the mid-late 90's we put together a multi -equipment custom setup in a base station radio enclosure. This consisted of a receiver, a paging encoder/ decoder, a small backup battery, and some other components. The whole deal was a custom built part of a system. I used what was intended to be a 'quality' power strip from a Square D distributor for power. I DID NOT KNOW that the outlets in the power strip were INTERCONNECTED WITH SCREWLESS SPRING TERMINALS

We put it together and tested it in the shop. We then hauled it clear up to Deer Lake mountain.......which is a terrible trail of a road, and miles away from anything--about 40mi from the shop--and installed it in the radio building, which has limited outlets and room..........ONLY TO DISCOVER that one of the outlets was not getting reliable power because of poor connections at these spring terminals.