8 March

Had a near disaster yesterday. Could smell smoke, and we tracked it down to the main house switchboard. The main 63A service fuse to the house was starting to catch fire, you can see the charred cables either side of it. The fuse itself didn’t trip, it wasn’t a load problem, the problem was the metal clips holding the fuse in place had become loose. You can see the screws used to tighten them. That caused the current to arc, and thus the burning. It struck me what a weird design the fuse is, and how little this is probably checked, particularly in older homes. Adding larger loads to our place (grid-charging-capable batteries and EV charging) had likely made this fault visible with higher loads flowing through. One to watch if you have older switch gear, and maybe something installers should be checking?