The home electricity lines run on a 230 V line. The electricity board suddenly decided to give away a generously higher voltage of 440 v to the home line in my neighbourhood. Wanna know what happened?
Television sets burst, Fans breathed smoke, Tube light chokes burst with huge sound effects and occasional display of sparkling colours. The choke burst in my house. Now now before everybody started blaming the error that happened let me ask some questions, why didn’t the fuse in their houses go out when the voltage increased? Why did it continue to conduct a dangerously high current onto appliances?
Power = Voltage X Current.
If voltage increases the power increases, this power should produce heat energy which will burn the fuse. A fuse is just a wire; Just a simple thin fucking wire.
What might appear on the outside as a sudden calamity actually did not happen suddenly. It actually happened so gradually that people did not notice it at all.
Let's rewind back to sometime. Whenever we had a fuse problem, what we did was to replace the fuse wire with a normal copper core taken from a normal wire. This is not how a fuse wire is supposed to work.
Let's see what Wikipedia has to say (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuse_electrical) :
A fuse is a type of low resistance resistor that acts as a sacrificial device to provide overcurrent protection, of either the load or source circuit.
It's like the weakest link in the circuit. It destroys itself so that other components in the circuit (or here, the house) do not destroy.
How the fuck would it destroy if a normal copper wire core is used as the fuse?
So from now on, whenever the fuse blows off, replace it with a proper wire of proper prescribed current rating. Will help you solve a lot of short circuits and electrical fires; if not completely eliminate them.
Just thought I should let people know, though I bet almost all reading this will know about this and still do the mistake of replacing it with a normal wire.
Hey man, this just might save your life. Just like the life of a giant is inside a small parrot, your life is on this small wire. Though unlike the parrot, let the fuse burn!