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Has your phone socket ever caught fire? |
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#1 |
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Join Date: Jun 2002
Posts: 9,700
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Has your phone socket ever caught fire?
A family say that their Sky/Openreach socket caught fire!
Openreach say that this is not possible. They gave him a temporary mobile internet connection, put in a power surge protector and offered him £120, but say that it must be due to his electric wiring being faulty ![]() Are dangerous power surges possible or common with telephone lines (with their low voltage)? Can they actually catch fire? BBC1 Wales would like anybody who has experienced this to contact them. The relevant item starts at about 0:13: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080ysbz |
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#2 |
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Join Date: Jan 2002
Posts: 5,187
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Quote:
Are dangerous power surges possible or common with telephone lines (with their low voltage)?
Quote:
Can they actually catch fire?
No.Sounds like either faulty internal mains wiring, a lightning strike, or maybe some external contractor digging a hole and shorting wires. |
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#3 |
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Join Date: Jun 2002
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Many thanks, it looks like BT are right then and the phone wiring has somehow come into contact with the mains
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#4 |
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Reading
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Thing that puzzles me is if the wiring had become live to the mains for whatever reason then it wouldn't do anything plugged into it any good and there would be a potential for anyone plugging a phone into the line to get a nasty belt.
And why did Openreach not see an unusual voltage on the line if they did indeed test it? Makes me wonder if this family plugged some faulty bit of kit into the line, for example a mains powered answering machine or DECT phone base station and it put the nasty voltage onto the line? |
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#5 |
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Join Date: Mar 2009
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In the item it said this: "Openreach fitted a 'breaker box', to act like a fuse, on the outside of the house"
Later on it was this 'breaker box' that actually caught fire. There were images in the programme showing a flame. Presumably taken by the householders at the time. This programme did not impress. I was expecting the BBC to bring in a technical expert to chat about it but they did not do that. For all the world it looks like the comm lines are having very high currents dropped on them. I assume that would happen in the green cabinet in the street. |
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#6 |
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Join Date: Apr 2011
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No. Thank God!
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#7 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Reading
Posts: 27,884
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Quote:
In the item it said this: "Openreach fitted a 'breaker box', to act like a fuse, on the outside of the house"
Later on it was this 'breaker box' that actually caught fire. There were images in the programme showing a flame. Presumably taken by the householders at the time. This programme did not impress. I was expecting the BBC to bring in a technical expert to chat about it but they did not do that. For all the world it looks like the comm lines are having very high currents dropped on them. I assume that would happen in the green cabinet in the street. |
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#8 |
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Join Date: Mar 2009
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Quote:
Not necessarily. It could be something plugged into a phone socket feeding a high voltage/current back up the line.
The programme did not mention this but it could have been an oversight of course. (The inside socket did smoke/burn, but that was before the external box was installed.) |
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#9 |
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Swansea
Posts: 871
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There's a lot of legacy infrastructure around where phone wires are carried lower down on poles which carry the 3 phase 240/415V electricity mains, often old open wire systems. I wonder whether the phone cable has come into contact with 240V at the pole rather than at the house.
This sort of thing - you can see the phone service as the thin wire at the lowest point http://www.electrical-contractor.net/PC/UKL_LV.jpg |
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