This was in a guesthouse bathroom, there was a showerhead pointed right at it.
This is a 20 amp circuit breaker, not only is it unprotected, when it failed someone bypassed it instead of replacing it with something correct. If you took a shower in the morning and water splashed on these open contacts you wouldn’t need coffee to get your heart started.
Is it a suicide shower (the kind where an unprotected 3000W+ heating wire runs through the water) with disconnected ground? (A grill around the nozzles is connected to a ground wire that is supposed to prevent the current from flowing into your body, but it tends to trip GFCI/RCD so stupid desperate people disconnect it against the advice in the manual. If they were desperate but smarter, they would connect the grill to neutral instead to prevent GFCI/RCD from tripping while maintaining slightly better leakage prevention.)
No it wasn’t one of those, though I have gotten a surprise from them a few times.
This was a small wall mounted unit with a thermoblock heater. There was no ground of course.
Ignoring all the obvious bad decisions, what were they trying to accomplish? Even if that was wired correctly in a breaker panel enclosure I can’t figure out why it would be placed in a location that had a shower head pointed at it.
Honestly I thought about it and I’m not sure what the intention was. It could have been mounted on the other side of the wall (outside the bathroom) just as easily.
I’ll have to dig it up but I have a photo of the old electric meter from the same place. It was buzzing quite loudly, then it melted. It would have been marginal when installed and was connected to only lights and ceiling fans, then they did a reno and added aircon and water heaters.
The meter melted? Jesus, that’s a unique place isn’t it haha
Found 'em
Thanks for the pictures.
What country are those from (can’t make out the markings on the meter)?
Or stopped for that matter.
A fuckin jbox and outlet and plate will sum to about $15. Breakers cost more than that.
I’m pretty sure there is an exception to that rule when it comes to electricity.
it works fine (as a conductor), it just won’t fail as one might expect (if they thought it had a fuse)/breaker)
It doesn’t really even need an exception. Working means disconnecting when more than 20 A are drawn, and this doesn’t do that. The rule works just fine, and counterexamples always boil down to someone misunderstanding the design goals and using a bad definition of works.
Yeah, I’d argue that even taken more broadly any shower that kills the occupants cannot be said to “work” by any reasonable definition.
Obviously, we can all think of one very notable and very unreasonable definition, but I doubt that was the intention here.
The wood bullet into the tile grout was a nice touch I thought.
Hey, it’s supported!
…kinda
Fr tho this is some incredible jimbo work
I’d argue this is not an exception, just a misunderstanding of what “works” means. Clearly the “protecting wires in case of overload” function is not working…
Welcome to brazil!
In which case, it’s most likely one of the flow-heating suicide showers
