Tag Archives: Portable Heaters

Electrical Fire Danger


I get very sad when I hear every year about someone, or a family of people dying, or being seriously injured in an electrical fire. The best time to raise awareness is when something unfortunate has happened however. This is nothing uncommon in reality since you will see a mention of calling the local fire department for smoke detectors and mention of checking your smoke detectors in the home.

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Call America’s Service Repair @ 864-354-9108 or (864) 648-9113

People tend to put things off especially spending money until a later time it is human nature. That however can often prove to be fatal with electricity.

One of the problems we see often is from portable heaters. People try to use them to supplement a central heating and air system either because their primary system has failed, or because they think it will save them money.

As you can see by this table that the continuous load is different than the amperage rating of a wire:

Nominal Rated Circuit Capacity Continuous Rated Circuit Capacity
5 amps 4 amps
10 amps 8 amps
15 amps 12 amps
20 amps 16 amps
30 amps 24 amps
50 amps 40 amps
100 amps 80 amps
200 amps 160 amps

We recently got a call from a customer that had a heating system that was broken down.
While there I noticed they were using portable electric heaters as a heating source.
The last thing I told the customer before I left was to watch out for those portable electric heaters since they can be dangerous.

The next day we got a call that the customer had plugged in one more portable electric heater to try and stay warm. This was enough to overload the circuit and cause it to blow a fuse and catch fire. Lucky the customer was there to be able to deal with it.  More often the customer is away from the home when the fire starts, or they are sleeping when it starts and don’t get a chance to put it out.

Here are some pictures of the fuse box and the damage to give you a first hand look at what happens.

2014-12-19_00040 2014-12-19_00039 2014-12-19_00038 2014-12-19_00037 2014-12-19_00036 2014-12-07_00023 2014-12-07_00022 2014-12-07_00021 2014-12-06_00018 2014-12-19_00045 2014-12-19_00043 2014-12-19_00042 2014-12-19_00041

For more information and help with your electrical needs