Possible House Fire, It Was Close

The wife woke me up one morning and it was starting to get smokey near the area of the computer system. I got to checking around and the smoke was coming from under our computer desk. I pulled all the wiring that was plugged into things and one of the items was a surge protector for the computer related components. I was told to use one a long time ago when a th'storm surged my computer and monitor and blew them up. Do yourself a favor and if the protector is quite old, replace it. I don't know how many actual surges it took over the years but it must have been one too many.

It was setting on the floor to the back of the computer desk and overheated and burned a hole thru the bottom plastic and was trying to catch the carpet on fire. That's where all the smoke was coming from. I did a teardown of it after throwing it outside for a few months to rinse out the smoke/stink. It could have been a lot worse if we would have been uptown when it decided to go.

Top of the protector with 15 amp surge.
http://i1135.photobucket.com/albums/...psqdkaeukn.jpg

Bottom with hole burned thru.
http://i1135.photobucket.com/albums/...pslcxmuzkc.jpg

This unit had a circuit board for the capacitors and wire wound chokes (i imagine for noise elimination).
http://i1135.photobucket.com/albums/...psz14wca45.jpg

And a better view of the burnt circuit board.
http://i1135.photobucket.com/albums/...psqhm7up2f.jpg

Glad your wife smelled it in time. Glad you were both ok!!!!!

Good to hear that you and your wife avoided a disastrous fire. Thank you for posting this as it's a good "heads-up" call for all of us to check ours' I know we have several of them and I will be checking them to day!

Thanks Mech. Your words of advice should prevent many more close calls. Time to check the surge protectors.

Now... scrap that thing!

Glad you and the wife are ok. Good lesson for the rest of us , check those out those surge protectors.

Glad you caught that in time Mech!
Glad everyone is safe!

Now that everyone IS safe.. I can say:
...you know when you are a scrapper when.... Your house could have burned down.. but after getting that bugger unplugged.. you tore it apart.

Very glad to hear that wife and you are safe and averted a potential disaster.

Time to install smoke detectors ?

Ummm .... that could have gone very wrong. It shouldn't do that ........

You might want to check your service entrance and most especially your building ground.

The building ground should be replaced every seven to ten years.

If you think about it .......... all of the grounds and white neutrals tie into the same bus in the breaker panel. If you lose your building ground there are some circumstances where 220 can run into a circuit intended to be 110. It's not common, but i saw it happen once when a tree fell across a service line.