jefcon1
New member
- Location
- champaign, il
Why would a hot 120v 30amp circut burn up wire, xfmr, and get past 2 breakers (primary and secondary) before finally blowing a 200 amp fuse in the switchgear?
"not trippin"
- Thread starter jefcon1
- Start date
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zog
Senior Member
- Location
- Charlotte, NC
Lack of proper coordination, or 2 failed breakers, but I bet no one did a coordination study.
copper chopper
Senior Member
- Location
- wisconsin
i have seen this, it was due to poor grounding and bonding...at the service in fact I could weld with some of the wires off of a 20 amp QO breakers...
marissa2
Senior Member
- Location
- Connecticut
I have heard people say that about GE but never about Square-D.
hillbilly1
Senior Member
- Location
- North Georgia mountains
- Occupation
- Owner/electrical contractor
Me either, Square D QO and Cutler Hammer CH (not BR) trip very fast on a short, Federal Pacific on the other hand is great for welding!
zog
Senior Member
- Location
- Charlotte, NC
Oh please, none of those statements have any justification. If GE breakers did not work they would be out of the business, and FP is made by the same company as Square-D. Show me any proof that any of those have high failure rates.
hillbilly1
Senior Member
- Location
- North Georgia mountains
- Occupation
- Owner/electrical contractor
I know you are very biased towards GE, and I've never heard that FP is made by the same company as Square D, even if it is true the internals are of a totally different design. To compare apples to apples, The Orange box used Square D up until Nardelli took over, then they switched to GE (wonder why?):roll: If you short a 20 amp circuit out in the Square D store, you get a small pop, then it's tripped, short out a 20 amp circuit in a GE store, the pipes rattle, then it trips. I'm not saying GE does not trip, it just allows a higher current through before tripping.
- Location
- Illinois
- Occupation
- retired electrician
It is not a failure of one device or another. The breaker standards do not specify the level of the instantaneous trip for small breakers. The instantaneous trip point for a Square D QO breaker is lower than any of the competitive products. The GE is the highest. They all do what the UL standards say them must do, but there are differences.
- Location
- Simi Valley, CA
Had a compressor sieze one time, bypassed the fuses, the heaters in the starter, the breaker feeding the starter and blew the 1200 amp tri-pack feeding all of this, to where we couldn't even reset it.
Never did figure out what happened, replaced the 1200 breaker and never had a problem again.
zog
Senior Member
- Location
- Charlotte, NC
Where do you get that from? You must have me confused with someone else.
Shorting out a breaker and listening to the sounds is not even close to being a test of how a breaker functions or when it trips. Primary inject a breaker and compare to manufactures TCC's, only way to test a breaker.
I test thousands of breakers annually and have nothing to support any (Major) manufacturer has any more or less of a failure rate than others. They are all designed and tested to UL 489.
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