Hi, this is Joshua Peterson with Peterson Electric. I am here in Fort Collins, Colorado. The service call that we came out was about the dryer tripping. Which on the phone, I was talking to the customer and the dryer was brand new. The first indication was the dryer was freaking out or the elements burned out, but it is not. We got over here, looked at the dryer and they are not a lot of scratches and the name tag looks new. We came to panel, here is what we found, we have a bunch of heated up edges on this buss bar for every single breaker. The dryer breaker was landing here and here, so you can see that was what was going on. The reason why that was happening was because the Diox inside these junctions in these aluminum feeders have dried up. My guess is this apartment is about 30 to 35 years old in Fort Collins. After that dries up, what happens is instead of it helping the conductivity, it actually acts like an insulator and this part of the buss bar runs hotter than the other side and the dryer motor and heater were probably on the same phase. While the other phase, which is going to be the A phase just did the heaters. What happens is the breakers were shutting down. The good thing is this is a Square D QO, these breakers don’t tolerate a lot of over heating, so they will shut down. Your breaker is designed for over current temperature on the wire, your default on your hot to your negative, which is your ground and also to your neutral. The other thing that it is sensing is the heat, so this breaker must have been heating up hot, shutting down just so the dryer wire didn’t bet any hotter. What we are going to do is we are going to take this panel out, try to see if we can sand it down. If that works and we can get that nice smooth silver look again, we will put it right back in and it should be fine because the breaker is not even melted. The first thing to go on these panels is always the plastic. As you can see, there is not even a single piece of plastic melted, so it is pre-mature. Thanks for joining us! We will see you next week!
