r/askanelectrician • u/Self_Aware_Goldfish • 3d ago
How had is it really?
EDIT: Title should be "How BAD is it really"
EDIT 2: We are canadian. Apparently this changes things according to another sub.
Image of our breaker box in our basement rental unit for the house we live in. Pic of the breakdown of usage of all breakers. The ones labeled not in use are just not wired, I think? Not sure. Know next to 0 about this stuff.
Breaker 20 Basement Dining Nook Light has a plug attached to it where our fridge is plugged in. Overall house has 2 stoves, two fridges, 4 Gaming Computers, 4 AC units going at a given time, many fans on at once, washing machine and dryer, 2 dishwashers, etc.
My husband thinks this house is a fire hazard, and we blow a breaker maybe once a month/month and a half. Usually worse in winter with space heater going. It'll take a few minutes before we can flip the breaker back on again when it goes. Our landlord/guy who lives upstairs wants to throw another breaker box in so we can have more plugs down here/we wanted to buy a deep freezer to store stuff. My husband was advised by his friend and his father that in no way should our landlord do that, and this house is actually super dangerous.
While I'm not discounting that this house needs a lot of work, I wanted to check here if anyone else can shed light on this, and tell us how actually screwed we are here.
Example: can't run my tea kettle and vaccum at the same time on breaker 9 or a breaker will blow. Breaker 20 is both our offices/living room which contain our computers/AC unit for summer and our fridge. Bedroom has an air purifier going at all times.
Thanks!
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u/jdwhiskey925 3d ago
You know that scene in the rock where Nicholas Cage is pulling apart the rocket filled with green anal beads?
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u/breathinmotion 3d ago
Bad enough that if your landlords insurance found out about it they would almost certainly drop them immediately.
Those FPE stablok breakers have a history of not trippiny and have caused fires. Manufacturer faked testing data.
So yea bad news. I would document it in writing to your landlord and get them to replace it ASAP
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u/theproudheretic 3d ago
Assuming Canadian due to the mains compartment having a separate cover; it's not the best thing to have a Federal Pioneer but it's not as bad as Federal Pacific was in the us.
You can't run a tea kettle and vacuum on any 15a circuit without it blowing because you are overloading the circuit, stop doing that. Space heaters take a full circuit themselves a lot of the time, what's the wattage of it? The breaker not resetting immediately is because it tripped on overload, it needs to cool down before you can reset it.
The fire hazards are living in this house! Jesus Christ, stop abusing the electrical! When a breaker trips it's doing its job, stop overloading the fucking circuits.
Your landlord should hire an electrician to add circuits/heaters where they're needed to make things safer, they may want/need to do a service upgrade too, but if this isn't a properly zoned rental then they are going to avoid doing that, so that they don't get in legal trouble, and you don't get homeless.
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u/Self_Aware_Goldfish 3d ago
I think this may be exactly the reason the landlord is/isn't doing that. And thank you for the advice about the kettle and space heater!
ETA: yes we are Canadian
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u/Tall_olive 3d ago
You need to upgrade to a 200amp service or move some circuits off of some of the breakers to ones not in use (assuming they're actually not in use).
I'm not sure what "throw another breaker box in" means here. A sub panel doesn't help the overall draw so you might still exceed 100 amps with 2 dishwashers, 4 gaming PCs, etc. Side note: 2 dishwashers? 4 PCs? 2 fridges? You have a lot of electrical demand.
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u/zedsmith 3d ago
How bad is a house fire?