Old Fuse Electrical Panel

Maintaining the safety of your old fuse box before breakers were the standard homes and facilities were built with fuse boxes that contained plug fuses.

Old fuse electrical panel.

Old electric services will have fuses and old electric services can have problems. An old fuse electrical panel is not garbage unless its not meeting its purpose of protecting the home and its occupants. There wasn t any 240 volt service for large appliances such as electric ranges and dryers. By maintaining associated wiring and connected electrical devices you can drastically reduce harm from shocks arc s or fires.

Fuse boxes are old electrical panels that use fuses instead of circuit breakers to protect your wires from becoming overloaded. Old electrical panels that use fuses are not innately unsafe and in some cases fuses may be safer than circuit breakers. The electrical service panel provides 100 200 or more amps of power to a home. Before 1950 a 30 amp fuse panel was the norm.

A typical 60 amp fuse box might have one 240 volt circuit for an air. A 30 amp service panel typically supplied only 120 volts to the home. This is why people get scared of fuses. Unlike aluminum electrical wire used in branch circuits a fire hazard copper clad aluminum wire performs about as well as copper wire and is considered safe for use in homes provided of course that the wiring has been correctly installed.

Plug fuses are still found in many older homes and businesses. The older fuses screw or pull in or out as opposed to the rocker style method of installing and removing circuit breakers. The fuses were installed in a ceramic fuse holder which was mounted within a black metal enclosure. When a circuit draws too much electricity the fuse burns out and must be replaced.

A 30 amp panel is far from. If you ve bought a house with electrical fuses you need a thorough electrical inspection immediately. Fuse boxes are an obsolete type of electrical panel found in homes built in the 1960s or earlier. But old panels in old houses are very often overloaded and not able to support the number of circuits and total amperage of electrical consumption that most people use in contemporary situations.

These fuse panels featured two plug fuses to protect the branch circuits and a knife blade switch to disconnect power to the entire panel and thus the house. Fuses aren t inherently unsafe.