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Q. We had a handyman over doing some work on our house. He needed to move an electrical outlet and so he took a piece of wire, bent it into a U shape and stuck both ends into the socket to trip the circuit out. It turned into a fireworks show with sparks and flame shooting out burning his hand and scorching the outlet. The breaker didn’t trip. He said he’d never seen that happen before and tripped out circuits he was going to work on that way all the time and this was the first time anything like this has happened. He looked at the electric panel box in the basement but didn’t see anything wrong. The panel brand is Federal Pacific Electric and we have had it since we have owned the house. The house was built in 1969 so I guess it was put in then. Do breakers get old and not work? What should we do?
A. I recommend you suggest to anyone, handyman or not, never to trip out a circuit like that. If you want to find out which breaker is controlling an outlet that you need to work on, then just plug a radio into it and turn it up so that you can hear it at the panel box. Then start switching breakers on and off until you hear the radio go silent. Then you’ve found it without doing something both dangerous and potentially damaging. The wiring to that outlet is probably fried and should really be checked out by an electrician. And you’ll be having one over soon and I’ll tell you why.
Federal Pacific Electric (FPE) panels were very popular from the 1950s through the late 1970s. Uncounted thousands of them were installed in homes and businesses over that period. They do not enjoy a good reputation and as you learned the one trait that you want to rely upon is that a circuit breaker, designed to trip open and stop the flow of electric current, does just that when overloaded.
The panels are a dark green or gray and have the name clearly on both the front and the information label on the inside of the panel door, so there’s no guessing whether you’ve got one or not.
Federal Pacific breakers have an astounding rate of failure. The Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) estimates that approximately 1% of all circuit breakers won’t trip when they should. In contrast, an investigation for the Consumer Product Safety Commission shows that up to 65% of FPE breakers that were tested didn’t work. For some unknown reason you can still buy replacement FPE breakers online but I don’t know an electrician worth his salt who would ever install one let alone sleep at night if he did.
I’ve had the argument thrown at me “Well it’s been here over twenty years and we haven’t had any trouble”. OK. Unfortunately, the test of time argument doesn’t work for electrical equipment. Under normal conditions, a circuit breaker does nothing but pass current, waiting for an unsafe overload to occur to trip it. If such an overload never happened, no one would know whether or not the breaker was defective. Even if an overload had occurred,and the breaker failed to trip, it’s possible that no one noticed that wiring had begun to overheat or breakers had begun arcing. There is simply no way to tell if the breakers will work properly without overloading them and observing their response as your handyman inadvertently discovered. Unfortunately such testing itself could affect their future performance and cause the damage you saw and even more behind the wall.
When ever I encounter an FPE panel I strongly recommend that it be immediately replaced. It might cost you over a thousand dollars but that’s cheap in the face of a potential house fire. And with FPE breakers it’s not if-- it’s when. The electrical experts Doug Hansen and Dan Friedman were consulted for this column.