A warning:

This is a warning to anyone who lives in an older manufactured home or a low-cost manufactured home.Many of these homes have wiring dangers that can cause fires. We were fortunate enough to discover the problem and get it corrected before we had a fire, but we did come very, very close.

Let me tell a little story. The first summer we were in the house here in Tumalo it was pretty hot, and we discovered that the house got uncomfortably warm, especially during the late afternoon. The church had a small window air-conditioner, so we installed it in one of the living room windows to try to cool down at least the main living area some. The first day after we installed it we had been running it for several hours when I went to go outside. It was dark, so I reached back in to turn on the outside light. While groping around for the switch I came in contact with the cover-plate screw on the switch, which turned out to be hot enough to burn my finger! All thoughts of doing whatever I had planned on doing went out of my mind and I immediately started tearing stuff apart to find out what was going on. What I found was disturbing - the wiring in our house was done using poor quality components and was wired in such a way that we were in significant danger of burning the house down.

The photos below show that original switch and one of the receptacles from the house. You can clearly see in both cases that they have been severely heat damaged. In order to melt the plastic the way they have the temperature had to be nearly hot enough to cause the nearby wood to burn. It was purely by the grace of God that we identified the risk in time. These pictures are all thumbnails, click on any of them to see a larger image. Following the pictures is a detailed explanation of what we found and the steps we took to fix it.

There were a couple of shortcomings in the wiring in our home that led to this problem. You need to understand that in any electrical wiring a wire leaves the main panel, goes to various fixtures (outlets, lights, switches, etc.) and returns to the panel. Normally this is done with a shielded cable containing two wires, one (usually the black wire) is the hot wire and the other wire (usually white) is the neutral or return wire. At each fixture there is a connection to the two wires in such a way that electricity is drawn for whatever the fixture is while still allowing power to flow to those beyond. In normal, high-quality wiring a wire might come into a box and another leave the box for the next point. In the box the two black wires are joined together along with a short "jumper" or "pigtail" wire that goes to the fixture. This approach allows for all the fixtures on the circuit to draw power without interfering with each other. Also note that the amount of electricity that can flow through a system is controlled by the amount of resistance on the circuit, with the most basic factor controlling resistance being the size of the wire. If we shrink the wire two things happen; first, less power gets through, and second, the wire heats up at that point.

The first problem in our wiring was that the wires were not connected to the fixtures via pigtails, but instead the hot wire would come into the box, connect to the fixture, then the outgoing hot wire would connect to another point on the fixture, with the neutral attached the same way. This meant that all of the current had to flow through the fixture - and for the fixtures early in the circuit, all the current demanded by everything else on the circuit had to flow through them. The second part of this problem was that the wire attachments to the fixtures were with so-called "stab-in" connectors. In these connectors the bared wire is pushed into a small hole in the back or side of the fixture and is held there by a small spring clip. This clip not only holds the wire, but also provides the electrical connection to the fixture. Normally, if the fixture is attached by a jumper this is adequate, although marginal, but when the fixture is made into a part of the main circuit and all the current has to pass through it that small spring clip is too small to carry the load and can heat up if the load beyond them is too great. That is what happened to us. When I plugged in the air conditioner it was too great a load for the small clip in the switch, even though it wasn't too much for the rating of the circuit or for the actual wiring. The switch began to heat up and the plastic body deformed to the point that the hot wire came loose. That wire was then arcing to the other hot wire, creating an open spark more than sufficient to start a fire. All of this was able to happen without tripping the circuit breaker because the actual load was never over the 15 amps the circuit was rated for and because the arcing was along the path of the hot wire rather than from hot to neutral (a short circuit). This entire problem was exacerbated by the very low quality of the fixtures installed at the factory.

The second major part of the problem was that the main circuits in the house were far to large. One circuit had the laundry room lights, the outside lights, all the living room outlets, the master bedroom lights and ceiling fan and half the master bedroom outlets on it. Another had the hall light, hall outlets, kitchen lights and vent hood, dining room lights and outlets, the other half of the master bedroom outlets, the lights, vent fan and outlets in the master bathroom, the outlet in the other bathroom and the outside outlets. The result was circuits that were overloaded with just the normal things plugged into them. In addition, the length of the wire run was excessive for the size of the wire and the load on it.

None of these problems were or are against code. At least at the time our home was built (1993), manufactured homes didn't have to meet the normal electrical code requirements for a conventionally constructed house. The attempts to build a lower-cost home created a safety hazard that could have easily led to tragedy.

What we did:

First, we replaced all of the fixtures in the house with higher quality ones.

Second, we wired everything using proper pigtails so that the current flow did not pass through any of the fixtures.

Third, we re-wired some of the circuits to split the load to where the wiring was adequate.

What you can do:

Look at the fixtures in your home and see if they are of the cheap kind pictured above.

Check the wiring to make sure that fixtures are wired using pigtails rather than passing the current through the fixtures.

See how many things are connected to each circuit.

There are a lot of manufactured homes out there that have this type of wiring and every one of them is at risk for a fire. Check yours and make sure you are safe.

Feel free to eMail me at:  if you have questions or comments.