Jim Rooney On The Level

Q. I had a contractor stop me last week and ask why I haven’t mentioned a certain brand of electrical panel that was used extensively in the 1950s through the 70s that has breakers with a poor reputation for not tripping out when over-loaded. I told him I had but it was some time ago so I related the story. I told him about a handyman doing some work on a friend’s house four years ago. 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 flames shooting out burning his hand and scorching the outlet. The breaker didn’t trip. He said he’d never seen that happen before and he 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 was Federal Pacific Electric and was original to the house. The house was built in 1969. The homeowner and the handyman wanted to know if was because the breakers went bad due to age. They’d never seen an overloaded breaker not trip.

A. My first suggestion to anyone, handyman or not, is 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 the volume 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 dangerous and potentially damaging, not to mention just plain dumb. The wiring to the fried outlet was ruined and had to be repaired by an electrician. That electrician had more to do when he got there when he saw the panel.

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. 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 the handyman inadvertently discovered. Unfortunately such testing itself could affect their future performance and cause damage behind walls you can’t see.

When ever I encounter an FPE panel I strongly recommend that it be immediately replaced. It might cost 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.

Keep the mail coming. If you've got a question, tip, or comment let me know. Write "On The Level," c/o The Capital, P.O. Box 3407, Annapolis, MD 21403 or e-mail me at jimrooney@jimrooneyonthelevel.com or inspektor@aol.com.