I won't be getting any ground meat from my store soon....

[ArcticChicken]

And here I am, scarfing down a cheeseburger. Yum. you can just taste the long pork.

Yeah, I just realized that I'm either a sick, sick individual, or should go into emergency medicine. I actually did consider going into medicine, but tube in people squick me out to no end. When my aunt had a mastectomy it was very difficult for me to be around her while she healed, because I just wanted to vomit every time I saw the drainage tube.

I'm still not lending a hand to the meat department, or lifting a finger to help them out. They grind my gears too much.

[Shalom]

tin foil has a relatively low fault current. It would have melted pretty quick - and if it didn't, the wiring going to it would have. You could have tossed a Zinsco breaker in and it would have proven to be more reliable... to keep the power on, no matter what. Had one of those bastard panels at my old place.

Thanks, man, you just caused me to spend an hour or two researching and rewriting the Zinsco article on pikiwedia...

FTT, or Failure To Trip. Ugh. My parents' old house had an FPE Stab-Lok panel, which are the only ones with a worse reputation than Zinsco for breakers not tripping when they ought.

We used to have an old Munsey electric broiler, with a bare heating coil in the top, which if you put it upside down (so the coil was at the bottom) and turned the tray over, could be used as an oven. It was supposed to be used this way; it even had the logo printed both ways so you could read it no matter which way it was oriented. So one day I plugged it in as an oven (coil at the bottom), not noticing that the tray was the other way round, and the grid fell down and shorted the coils. Didn't realise this had happened, until the kitchen light went out; I yanked the plug out, and the light came back on. Apparently the short had drawn so much current that it dropped the voltage below what it took to keep the fluorescent lamp ionized. Breaker never tripped.

(I went down there later and found that some genius, probably the retired electrician who'd sold us the house, had stuck a 30 amp breaker in there! We had it replaced by a 15 some time thereafter, which was more appropriate to the size of the wiring. Note that this was the same house where I pulled an outlet in my bedroom, intending to install a 3-prong grounded outlet in its place, and found that he'd tied three wires to a socket with only two screws. How, you ask? Simple, he tied two of them to a pigtail with a wire nut, and put the pigtail on the screw. So far so good, except that his pigtail was apparently made from a piece of 16 gauge zip cord... Hell, even a 15 amp breaker was too much for that. Also the same house where he ran a new line for the refrigerator so it could be on its own circuit, but then left the old BX cable in the outlet box, live and unterminated except for a strip of UL tape over the ends. House hasn't burned down yet, as far as I know. I guess he figured that in his own home he could take shortcuts; I hope to $DEITY that he didn't pull shtick like that on his job, or he wouldn't have had it very long.)

The problem with the FPE breakers, by the way, was mostly associated with the dual-gang ones for 208 volts (we didn't get 230 in New York City). Idea is that if one phase trips, say if one of the wires shorts to ground, it pulls the other phase down with it. In these breakers, though, if you trip one phase, it typically would jam, and then would not only never trip again under any circumstance, but you couldn't even shut it off manually (or worse, you could shut it off and it would still stay on). The single gang ones would sometimes do this as well, though. And I just found out from my father that his current house also has FPE breakers. Ugh... time to call electricians, methinks.

[bean]

FTT, or Failure To Trip. Ugh. My parents' old house had an FPE Stab-Lok panel, which are the only ones with a worse reputation than Zinsco for breakers not tripping when they ought.

Oh you mean something like this?

(yes, it's in my current apartment... sigh)

edit: oops, it's not Stab Lok, but it's still FPE. Some work on google reveals that stab lok was discontinued around 1980, and this place was built in 1984... no stab-lok logo anywhere either. They do trip, at least.

[KiaKat]

The problem with the FPE breakers, by the way, was mostly associated with the dual-gang ones for 208 volts (we didn't get 230 in New York City). Idea is that if one phase trips, say if one of the wires shorts to ground, it pulls the other phase down with it. In these breakers, though, if you trip one phase, it typically would jam, and then would not only never trip again under any circumstance, but you couldn't even shut it off manually (or worse, you could shut it off and it would still stay on). The single gang ones would sometimes do this as well, though. And I just found out from my father that his current house also has FPE breakers. Ugh... time to call electricians, methinks.

Ah, NYC.

I'm assuming Queens or Brooklyn, given that you're referring to a house. For the moment, we'll assume Brooklyn (since I'm most familiar with it).

Brooklyn has a nickname - Crooklyn. There is good reason for this, given that with a few well-placed bribes, a landlord can speed up the permit process, have illegal permits issued (for an illegal contractor, natch), and do everything possible to invalidate the C of O without actually having the government find out that said C of O is invalidated.

Until the owner tries to sell, of course. At which point either they have to get an entirely new C of O, bribe YET MORE people to falsify papers and forms, or simply sell "as-is" and put the burden on the new owners.

Or the bank, if they've defaulted.

I believe Queens isn't much better, at least for single-family residential. Given the sheer number of townhouse complexes that have gone up (ONE FAMILY HOUSE FOR ONLY $400K!) in the last five years, I think there's gotta be SOMETHING going on there.