Fuse Box and Circuit Breaker Box Safety

The fuse box or circuit breaker box is the electrical nerve center of your Crown Point, Cedar Lake, or Dyer home.  Everything that you plug into an outlet or screw into a light socket that’s not running on batteries but uses electricity in the home counts on fuse and breaker boxes to do their job, and do it safely.  You do too.  Accordingly, here are a few safety tips to keep in mind when accessing the nerve center of your home:

1. Just say “no” to H2O.  We’ve all been warned at one point or another not to use electric appliances like hair dryers, curling irons, or plug-in radios near the bath tub.  The principle is shockingly basic: water and electricity don’t mix.  Apply that principle to electric boxes.  If your home has recently suffered water leakage or flooding, possibly from extreme weather conditions or a roof leak, and your walls are wet DO NOT access your electrical box.  Again, water and electricity don’t mix, so if walls are wet, and/or you are standing in standing water stay away from the fuse or breaker box.  You are quite literally risking death.
2. Replace blown fuses only with properly sized replacement fuses.  Incorrectly replacing fuses, or worse, attempting to bypass the fuse or breaker altogether by wiring around it risks starting an electrical fire, and that’s not the kind of fire you put out with water!  Always, ALWAYS use a properly rated and sized replacement fuse.  Your home circuits were designed with this built-in safety feature for a reason.  Which brings us to…
3. Call an electrician if…  If you have to constantly replace blown fuses or reset tripped circuit breakers something is wrong, especially if you’re repeatedly installing the correct fuse.  You either have an overloaded circuit, meaning a few too many combination TVs, stereos, DVD players, and video game systems plugged into one circuit, or some other malfunctioning short in the circuit.  If unplugging and relocating some of your electrical equipment to lighten the load doesn’t solve this you need to call an electrician right away to inspect your wiring for safety