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.


Bottom with hole burned thru.


This unit had a circuit board for the capacitors and wire wound chokes (i imagine for noise elimination).


And a better view of the burnt circuit board.

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.

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

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

Time to install smoke detectors ?