Almost electrical fire

jmgratz

Original Owners Club Member
Our kitchen light would flash every once in a while. I looked at the bulbs and they were black on the ends of the tubes so I replaced both blubs thinking they were defective. The light would still flash occasionally so after a couple of days I removed the fixture from the ceiling and checked the connection remembering I had read on the forum that the twist on connectors might get loose. Sure enough the connector on the black wire was melted. DW smelled something the other day but there are so many strange smells in an RV park I didn't think much of it cause the smell didn't last nor did I smell it again. Anyway, just wanted to give y'all a heads up to pay attention. BTW I repaired the connection removing the burned wire and connection and it is working fine now. Oh yeah, the connection was a twist on one and was also taped in place with electrical tape. The positive thing is I have two extra light bulbs (florescent). Photo of the burned twist on connector I cut out.charred connector.JPG
 

2psnapod2

Texas-South Chapter Leaders-Retired
Wow, you are so lucky. That could have been really bad. Glad it did not do you in.
 

Niles

Well-known member
This is another almost, Deb went out to the camper the other day and heard a buzzing noise. She thought it was coming from the ceiling fan, and tried eveything to get it to quit. No such luck, she gave up and had lunch, then went back out to try and find it again, bingo it was coming from the speakers in the ceiling. So she checks the TV nothing going on there, next she checks the Coby DVD player, when she goes to open the cabinet the door is hot, not good. When she does open it though so much heat comes out she is shocked it's not smoking. The Coby DVD player is too hot to move so she unplugged it and got some hot pads and pulled it out as far as she could without unhooking all the connections in back. This is the second one we've had because of them being so cheap, the next one will not be. One more day or even hour might of meant a new camper, tv, pick-up, lawn mower, back-hoe, and alot of tools besides the building itself.
 

jmgratz

Original Owners Club Member
This is another almost, Deb went out to the camper the other day and heard a buzzing noise. She thought it was coming from the ceiling fan, and tried eveything to get it to quit. No such luck, she gave up and had lunch, then went back out to try and find it again, bingo it was coming from the speakers in the ceiling. So she checks the TV nothing going on there, next she checks the Coby DVD player, when she goes to open the cabinet the door is hot, not good. When she does open it though so much heat comes out she is shocked it's not smoking. The Coby DVD player is too hot to move so she unplugged it and got some hot pads and pulled it out as far as she could without unhooking all the connections in back. This is the second one we've had because of them being so cheap, the next one will not be. One more day or even hour might of meant a new camper, tv, pick-up, lawn mower, back-hoe, and alot of tools besides the building itself.

Glad you caught it in time. So much stuff that can go wrong.
 

Crumgater

Well-known member
Glad you all found the shorts in time, too! I'm not too thrilled to hear all the recent stories of bad twist connectors. Those might be lurking behind any or every wall!

Our story isn't nearly so exciting. We had one of our light switches go bad. It took it a year to fail completely. The main ceiling light switch in the main panel cabinet seemed to get warm when ever the lights were on. Not real hot, so we just kept an eye on it. If finally failed last week. The switch was slightly brown, so something internal shorted out. Camping World carried the right switch in the right color - so we bought two (<$3 each). 10 minutes to replace the switch, and all is good now. No more hot switch. Glad we were there to catch it when it finally failed for good!
 
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