phoenixrising
Member
It's been a bad day so far, but I am so very thankful that it wasn't worse.
I came home from work this morning after a particularly hard night to find the faint odor of something burning in my basement. My whole SW system is in my basement along with all sorts of other stuff I treasure. I looked around but found nothing, so like a total idiot I went out to feed my horses (etc), clean stalls and spread manure...usual morning stuff. Grabbed the ax on the way out to the woods to clear a little more of a new trail I am building. All in all, I spend about an hour longer outside with the horses than I usually do. Came back in to head downstairs to get the dogs fed, the tank dosed and so forth. I smelled the smoke before I even opened the basement door. I tore down the stairs in nasty smoke but couldn't find the problem. Shut down the whole system and everything else I could think of to unplug. Wasn't thinking too clearly...probably should have just gone to the breaker box and shut the whole place down.
After a few frantic phone calls, my friend came over to help me locate the problem. There were no flames and no hot walls and two of the circuit breakers had been tripped. Finally located the problem. Some of the electrical connections beneath the refugium had melted down for some reason quite spontaneously. It was a big melted down mess of rubber. Smelly stuff. Charred the inside of the cabinet pretty bad, but no fire I don't think. Outside of the cabinet is okay.
We fixed all the damaged cords, cutting off the melted plug (from the mag7) and put on a new one and replaced the others. The chiller is plugged into the same outlet but somehow seems to be okay. My friend tells me that the ground wire was bad due to build up of salt corrosion. I had a flood (40 or so gallons) from the fuge 2 weeks ago due to a loss of siphon from the CPR overflow and water had gotten all over the electrical connections (and everywhere else...gotta love those early morning floods). I had disconnected everything to dry it all off, but I guess I didn't get it dry enough. The result was a meltdown.
Scarry stuff. Somehow I have to get the smoke stench out of the basement. My husband will give birth to kittens if he finds out about this. I never mention the occasional floods either. The less he knows about the various disasters in the basement, the better. Nothing ever looks out of place or different, but the carpet has been saturated many times and now I've almost burned the house to the ground.
It's been an un-nerving day. I'm getting too old for this....
I came home from work this morning after a particularly hard night to find the faint odor of something burning in my basement. My whole SW system is in my basement along with all sorts of other stuff I treasure. I looked around but found nothing, so like a total idiot I went out to feed my horses (etc), clean stalls and spread manure...usual morning stuff. Grabbed the ax on the way out to the woods to clear a little more of a new trail I am building. All in all, I spend about an hour longer outside with the horses than I usually do. Came back in to head downstairs to get the dogs fed, the tank dosed and so forth. I smelled the smoke before I even opened the basement door. I tore down the stairs in nasty smoke but couldn't find the problem. Shut down the whole system and everything else I could think of to unplug. Wasn't thinking too clearly...probably should have just gone to the breaker box and shut the whole place down.
After a few frantic phone calls, my friend came over to help me locate the problem. There were no flames and no hot walls and two of the circuit breakers had been tripped. Finally located the problem. Some of the electrical connections beneath the refugium had melted down for some reason quite spontaneously. It was a big melted down mess of rubber. Smelly stuff. Charred the inside of the cabinet pretty bad, but no fire I don't think. Outside of the cabinet is okay.
We fixed all the damaged cords, cutting off the melted plug (from the mag7) and put on a new one and replaced the others. The chiller is plugged into the same outlet but somehow seems to be okay. My friend tells me that the ground wire was bad due to build up of salt corrosion. I had a flood (40 or so gallons) from the fuge 2 weeks ago due to a loss of siphon from the CPR overflow and water had gotten all over the electrical connections (and everywhere else...gotta love those early morning floods). I had disconnected everything to dry it all off, but I guess I didn't get it dry enough. The result was a meltdown.
Scarry stuff. Somehow I have to get the smoke stench out of the basement. My husband will give birth to kittens if he finds out about this. I never mention the occasional floods either. The less he knows about the various disasters in the basement, the better. Nothing ever looks out of place or different, but the carpet has been saturated many times and now I've almost burned the house to the ground.
It's been an un-nerving day. I'm getting too old for this....
