Burned Wire in Wall?

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1-1/2 2hours unless it is an incredibly large house.

29 years ago when we started doing IR, everyone said it was to expensive, not practical and was IR just a gimmick. Today it is pretty much the standard in hospitals and data centers and pretty much accepted industry wide. It was a long slow sale, but the market increased with time.
 
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brian john said:
1-1/2 2hours unless it is an incredibly large house.

29 years ago when we started doing IR, everyone said it was to expensive, not practical and was IR just a gimmick. Today it is pretty much the standard in hospitals and data centers and pretty much accepted industry wide. It was a long slow sale, but the market increased with time.
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Brian, you quite possibly just changed my way of thinking:)
 
Jerry B said:
. Just out of the box the wire had melted at a romax staple and burned about 4 inches up the stud, .
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This must happen all the time. I absolutely hate staples and keep my stapling to a minimum. Granted, it's generally operator error but I can't count the number of cables I've seen damaged from overzealous heavy handed staplers.

That's a tiny heating element nailed right into the wood.
 
220/221 said:
This must happen all the time. I absolutely hate staples and keep my stapling to a minimum. Granted, it's generally operator error but I can't count the number of cables I've seen damaged from overzealous heavy handed staplers.

That's a tiny heating element nailed right into the wood.
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Again, it's not the staples fault. It's the installer.

If you want to 'outlaw' every possible item that can be installed incorrectly, there would be nothing available to install.
 
You would need to drive that staple not just into the outside jacket but bite into 1 of the wires before it could do what happened here. Staples are not sharp and does not require a lot of skill. I was buying them by the bucket. What happened here is rare. I will assume it was one that did bite in. And do understand that leakage was likely going on for many years. Perhaps all them years with a breaker that can't trip let it get that bad. The new afci might have helped here. They were lucky that the new breaker worked. Have changed out many old panels and never meged any.
 
Jim W in Tampa said:
You would need to drive that staple not just into the outside jacket but bite into 1 of the wires before it could do what happened here. Staples are not sharp and does not require a lot of skill. I was buying them by the bucket. What happened here is rare. I will assume it was one that did bite in. And do understand that leakage was likely going on for many years. Perhaps all them years with a breaker that can't trip let it get that bad. The new afci might have helped here. They were lucky that the new breaker worked. Have changed out many old panels and never meged any.
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And I'd bet you'd have to go through quite a few buckets to get it just right if you were intentionally trying to recreate this incident.
 
brian john said:
And I'd bet you'd have to go through quite a few buckets to get it just right if you were intentionally trying to recreate this incident.
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Yes, you're right. I have made mock setups in my shop with arc faults and experimented with driving metal staples too far. You would actually be quite surprised at the amount of abuse it takes to get the breaker to trip.
 
Once you find a fault in the wiring like that, a circuit tracer makes quick work of locating where it's at. I located an insulater's staple run through the neutral and ground behind a sheetrock wall. Cut a 2"X2" hole and was dead on locating it. The owner was ready to cut out entire walls to find it!
 
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