Breakers

Breakers –


I’ve had two bad electrical breakers recently – one for my hot water heater, and one in the workshop/barn.

The breakers trip when you try to reset them even though there is no over-current in the circuit.

Of course, first I immediately suspected the 35 year old water heater – just think of all the deposits and sediment and corrosion on the heating elements!

Nope, it was the breaker.

Some people still have old-fashioned fuses in their homes –
They have to go into the basement with a flashlight when one blows,
and you have to replace them –
You never have to do this with a breaker – you merely reset it.

And so it has been for many, perhaps 35, years ...

But fuses don’t break. Fuses don’t wear out.
Breakers do!

Hmm, should I get real crazy and use fuses, rather than breakers, for my PV system?
I don’t want a problem 30 years from now ...
Of course, maybe the breakers are made better today,
or worse,
I don’t know ... haven’t researched this ...
but I do know about fuses.

I could be getting old fashioned, and out of date ...
I can remember the story of when Bob Wilson signed on as
the first Laboratory Director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
(He had been in Italy painting).

He envisioned a control-room with hundreds of big variacs and potentiometers on the wall, with pencil marks showing where to set them ...

And the young engineers wanted to try CAMAC – [Computer Automated Monitoring And Cotrol] where they instead used D/A and A/D converters to control the entire complex by computer.

Of course, the engineers were right, and that is how the machine was built!
This is perhaps one of the examples why Bob Wilson was such an esteemed leader!
He listened!
A leader who successfully brought the project in, above the design energy, early and under the budget – actually giving money back to Congress.

But getting back to breakers –

All the poor old-fashioned people with fuses usually have dozens of them, with different amperage ratings sitting around their electrical boxes.

People with breakers don’t always have, sitting around, dozens of SPST or SPDT breakers of various amperage ratings.

On the other hand, I’ve discovered today a way to safely "kludge" such breakers – and perhaps, this puts me ahead of the Fuse People – having a working breaker is a bit more safe than putting in a penny – and when is that last time someone actually tried using a penny in their fuse box?

– pennies used to be copper; they are now copper-coated zinc.

So, I ended up cleaning out the mouse-nests from the electrical box,
which was good,
because it required moving the shop vac FROM THE BARN to
the workshop!

So, if anyone asks me what I did today,
I shall just say,

“Oh, cleaned the barn!”.

And they may think to themselves,
My, you poor fellow, such a trivial and meaningless existence you suffer,
and then ask me, “Why clean the barn?”.

Oh, because I need to clean the barn in order to clean the workshop!

And they ask, “And why clean the workshop?”.

Because the bluebirds told me they need more bluebird boxes.

Is that such a trivial meaningless existence?