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Spikes! Yikes!!

Stuart Pedaso

Stuart Pedaso

In too deep
Subscriber
Ever wonder what happens when some fool sends a kite up in the early A.M. and tangles a power line?

On our street there was a big BANG. Line broke in three places -- the end of one landing in our back yard. Took PG&E 14 hours to patch things up and restore service.

That's when I went out to reset tripped breakers and found the house wiring was not all happiness and joy.

One breaker refused to reset. It feeds mostly kitchen/dining room lights and outlets. The back porch light on that circuit has heavy sooty deposits around its perimeter.

A dedicated 20A breaker for the dryer did reset, but its GFCI outlet in the garage would not, and is a similar sooty mess.

Also lost a couple of surge suppressor power strips. The most dramatic was a Tripp Lite unit feeding the living room flat panel, DVR and DVD player. I knew the outlet was live; a separate power strip was lit. So I hit the reset button on the Tripp Lite. It buzzed, spat fat sparks and spewed plumes of smoke for the second-and-a-half it took to pull the plug.

Something rattled inside when I picked it up. And it stank to high-heaven of smoke. Took it outside to assess the damage:

Seems ordinary on the outside (except for the smell ...)
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Toasty carnage on the inside. These MOVs have found their current limit!
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Can't complain though. This little unit did its job -- made the ultimate sacrifice to save a $1200 TV.

May take a few days yet to sort out house wiring issues ...
 

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That sounds and looks like a lot of damage :sigh: - I hope you can get squared away in a short time with minimal cost.
 
What a story! The folks at Tripp Lite may want to hear this.

Hope your H.O insurance covers the damage.
 
hmm there's actually more in that triplite than i expected to see!more than just fancy marketing printed on it,i actually see what looks like three isolation Xformers!nice...

[correction i guess i'm looking at it backwards and upside down lol...backside of the outlets :) ]

primary protection was likely only Mov's tho...they likely got vapourized by the spike,possibly causing a lot of that blackness.it's hard to tell for sure at this point,but those things that look like disc capacitors are likely them...that one in the left of the pic,has certainly failed pretty spectacularly!

still like you say,in the end it did it's job....good luck with the rest of the mess
 
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file an insurance claim on everything N O W -NOT 2 WEEKS FROM NOW WHEN OTHER GEAR STARTS FAILING.
 
loonze said:
file an insurance claim on everything N O W -NOT 2 WEEKS FROM NOW WHEN OTHER GEAR STARTS FAILING.
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Sounds like sage advice. Already contacted Pacific Gas & Electric, who are sending a claim form of some sort. Will talk to our H.O. insurance agency this morning and get that ball rolling as well.

Fortunately, other than AV stuff, none of my stereo gear was plugged in at the time. We're undergoing a total house re-arrangement to accommodate our daughter and young grandson moving in. So it's a combined spring cleaning while fitting 2 households' furnishings into one small home sort of chaotic madness.

But it's never boring! :D
 
Ummm, so what happened to the fool and his kite? I see kites in power lines occasionally and no power outages as a result. What caused it.
 
The charred inside is pretty cool and all, but I was really hoping for something more awesome, like a jaguar or treasure inside.

Then again I can't remember the last time I heard about of saw a kite.

.dew.
 
wow! the primary voltage before the transformer must have brushed against the wire leading to your service! thats a lot of volts, luck if anything works! hope it turns out OK for you.
 
cubby01 said:
Ummm, so what happened to the fool and his kite? I see kites in power lines occasionally and no power outages as a result. What caused it.
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I've seen kites tangled in perfectly functional power lines too. Didn't personally see this kite, the fool or even venture to ground zero a bit down the street. Seems to me you'd have to tangle the kite about half way between poles, where the line has most play. Then have a high enough test kite string to pull it into an adjacent line.

OTOH, overheard the repair crew planning to set a guy wire and re-align a pole pummeled some time previously by a motorist. Maybe there had been enough sag in the lines to deflect one sufficiently without much effort.

I dunno. The PG&E rep said it was a kite. :dunno:
 
:yikes:

Just getting ready to order a kite. Maybe I should order some insulated gloves and boots too. :scratch2:
 
Hyperion said:
Maybe the actual kite shorted the cables - not the string?
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Yeah, maybe so. I used to fly sport kites of 7 and 8 ft wingspans with carbon fiber spars. Come to think about it way back I had kites with aluminum spars.

I've never been at real risk of crossing a power line though.
 
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