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Joshua Peterson with Peterson Electric. Today, I wanted to show something about FPE, Federal Pacific Electric. Basically in the trade, we have our own slang for that, we call it “fire pacific”. The way you know that you have an FPE panel is you have red breakers or black. Here is the most common sense, there is a name tag right here. On the front door cover is FPE. The reason why, this is kind of a concern is that these breakers have had an issue that if you try to pull them off, which is very, very difficult. You can see there are stab lock right here is a male stud. Breakers now days have to have the male stud on the bus-bar, then on the female the breaker should have the female part on the breaker that receives into that system. As far as the rumor goes and what you can study that is not a rumor, you will find out that FPE never got some of its U.L. Listing on some of these panels. When they came out in the market, they stopped mass producing them, but there is a ton of these in certain cities of Colorado, Fort Collins, Loveland, Arvada, Aurora, Centennial, Littleton. I have seen a lot these panels. The issue with these breakers is that they will not trip. By my own personal experience, I had a service call on an electric range 50 amps, 240 volts phase to phase. I dropped a screw on the terminal block and I blew it off the range because it fell on accident. It took the screw and melted it like solder. I went write around the corner to the panel and the breaker never tripped. It stayed running the whole time. When you have 240 phase to phase hitting head on like that, that breaker is strong even to blow the main out back. It didn’t blow anything in this apartment. In my experience, these breakers are not detecting dead shorts, ground faults or even over current draws and tripping so the wire does not melt. Thanks for joining us & have a great day!
