Holy melting circuit breakers, Batman!!!
Have you had this happen to you? Please comment if your Residential or RV load center has burned a circuit breaker...
Hi Mike,
This circuit breaker failed about 2 years ago and then again this month when on shore power 30amp service. Is it possible to overload the single connection to the buss bar with this type of circuit breaker? Several people have had this same failure after I posted in on a forum I follow.
Thanks for your input. - Mike PascucciÂ
Dear Mike P.
I saw this exact sort of thing thing happen in my dad’s residential breaker panel. I had upgraded his service panel myself around 20 years ago, so I know it was done properly with quality parts. But 5 years ago I was installing a lockout breaker for a backup generator. And I needed to move a 2-pole, 30-amp electric water heater breaker, but it wouldn’t budge. So after a few minutes of wiggleing and prying the breaker came out. And I saw exactly the same type of overheating burn mark on one of the contacts. Plus I saw that the bus bar in the panel was burned.
What was the fix?
I was close to replacing the entire service panel since I knew that just replacing the breaker without replacing the bus bar would allow it to fail again. But after carefully filing the bus bar to remove the burn marks, and cleaning all the circuit breakers and bus bar spot with contact cleaner, everything looked perfect. However, I didn’t trust that section of the bus bar for the high-current load of an electric water heater, so I moved a low-current breaker into that circuit position.
Should you check your RV circuit breakers?
This should not occur even with a full amperage load, if this can happen twice, then perhaps it’s a trend. While this failure could be caused by a circuit breaker that was built out-of spec, there’s the possibility that something else is causing this contact overheating. But I’m not ready to recommend periodically checking for burned breaker contacts just yet. But if you do find one, you can’t just plug in a new circuit breaker without replacing or properly repairing the panel bus bar.
Have you had this happen to you?
If so, please comment below and I’ll email my engineering contact at a breaker manufacturer to see if they can provide any maintenance suggestions.
Let’s play safe out there…. Mike
My thought would be to steer clear of a single contact breaker that is capable of pulling that many amps. That one in the picture could pull up to 45 amps. I would rather see a double on lighting circuits and keep the 30 amp main seperate.
We see a lot of that here in the desert, it is almost always a Siemans panel with twins (but not always) and most of the time it is at or near the air conditioning breaker. Even though AC units are not really considered a continuous load because they cycle on and off, in the desert they can sometimes run for many hours without cycling.
Once a breaker melts like that I have found that you can no longer use that bus stab or it will only happen again. This is on aluminum busses with tin plating, once the tin plating is damaged the stab is finished.