There goes my coffee. Was fixing toast and egg when a circuit breaker tripped. Now, there is no fridge and half the house lights, kitchen bathroom and hall. Lovely. Both heaters were on, but are still on, not on the same line. ???
Am I right to assume that resetting it is enough or given the conditions, should I take a more cautious approach?
Switch off the heaters and reset. If it trips again, there’s a short-circuit somewhere, and you need to get an electrician in. If it doesn’t, then you know that the heaters were drawing too much current, or one of them has a short.
i have the same issue…toasting while heatering and kettle boiling will trip the circuit…best just turn the heater off when toasting.
Yeah, did that already. What puzzles me is that the area affected was the kitchen mostly. I have a new kitchen furniture thinghy, with a main plug where the hot plate and the oven were connected to. I am a bit more suspicious of that, but yeah, it doesn’t help the heaters were on.
Going to pull the switch now. If you do not hear from me… send in the cavalry!
Thank you guys, JP and Bear!
So it was you, Icon, who caused that earthquake!
I strive to be the kind of woman who, when her feet touch the floor in the morning, the devil goes “crap, she’s up”. 
you’re using heaters? it’s not that cold.
In our place all the wiring is incorrectly rated, presumably to save money by using cheap, thin cables. The entire kitchen circuit is therefore on (I think) a 16A breaker, which basically means you can’t run the microwave and the kettle at the same time, or the breaker will trip. You may have something similar in your house, especially if it’s a new building. No big deal. Just reset it and remember not to do it next time. Older buildings tend to be the other way, i.e., breakers that NEVER trip.
Stuart: Just got up, and the house was chilly, so I thought I’d run them an hour or two, to make the morning easier…
Finley: mine is a 40 year old place. Lemme tell you, when I checked the breakers, none were OFF. I am sure I heard the loud CLACK! just before the power went off, so, I know one tripped, but the whole box was ON. So I wiggled and turned each one on and off until the fridge came back to life.
I looked for my reliable shuidien han guys, but both seem to have taken Sunday off. Oh well, better be careful and have this stuff checked out Wednesday.
When they trip they don’t go all the way down, but sit at an intermediate position a bit below “ON.” You might have missed it.
My breaker trips if I have both heaters on at once. No big deal. Just toggle the proper switch (my switch does not flip when the breaker trips), remember what kind of load set it off, and try to avoid doing it again.
Here’s something you should NOT do… push your electrical system (new or old) to the brink frequently. Electricity is a pretty blue thang that will kill your ass dead before you can say… wow, that’s neat…
Seriously, electrical fires are no joke and if you think liquefied white-hot smoldering wires inside your walls are something to F-with, then you’ve got solid brass for balls. Repeated overloading of your wiring system will degrade a number of components from the connectors, to the jacketing, to the insulation, down to the wires themselves. Problem is by the time you figure out that you’ve “gone to far” or “waited to long”, you’ll be either doing that from across the street as you watch it flame to the ground, or you’ll be inside that inferno when it goes and die from smoke inhalation (best case) or burn to death not able to escape in time… :fume:
Go on, bet me I’m wrong. :fume:
DS
It ain’t a smart thing to do, of course, but it’s unlikely to do any real damage as long as the breaker is correctly rated, the cables are the correct size, and you haven’t actually created a dead short. A 2x overload (say, 30A drawn through a cable rated for 15A) for a few seconds will generally cause an insignificant temperature rise. Problem is there are a lot of “ifs” in that sentence and no actual installation standards in Taiwan - at least, none that are taught or enforced. It’s up to each “electrician” to make it up as he goes along. Also, the crappy US-style plugs and sockets they use here (laughably rated at 20A) are inherently unsafe.
Best thing to do is just use your common sense - don’t leave any high-power equipment unattended (or, come to think of it, any other sort of equipment), and don’t overload sockets or add excessive socket strips.
And today’s tragedy was… no water when I got up. Thank God shuidien han were open.
You are either a Kiwi, a Canadian, or an Eskimo.
I told my wife I have an electric fire on last night and she freaked out, thinking I’d had an electrical fire. Then she berated me about speaking old English to new English speakers.
:roflmao: I get that too. No, I understood you perfectly … you just don’t know how to speak English properly.