Shocking Inspection Finds In Your Home’s Electrical Panel
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Your electrical panel is the heart of your home’s electrical system, and it’s a good idea to know your way around it. And when I say, “know your way around it,” I mean know where it is, know how to flip the breakers, and maybe even know how to change the breakers. Anything beyond that, know that you should probably call an electrician. As we’ve said many times here at Upon Closer Inspection, it’s just not a good idea to DIY electricity.
Here are a few recent interesting electrical panel home inspection finds:
That’s Shocking
In this picture, you can see where someone has drilled a screw through the panel box from the wall behind, just scraping the edge of the wire. To add insult to injury, they did this using a wood screw, which you should never ever use near an electrical panel. You always use blunt tip screws when working around the electrical panel. Sharp-tipped screws can come into contact with wiring, which can lead to sparks, tripped breakers, or electric shocks.
Spaghetti Panel Box
If your panel box looks like this, somebody’s uncle has been wiring your house, and you should probably call an electrician. This is a mess, and nobody knows what’s going on here.
RIP
It’s not uncommon to find a dead lizard or squirrel in your panel box. Critters crawl in there during the winter to keep warm and sometimes get stuck or electrocuted. But this is … like an uncommon amount of corpses. There’s nothing to learn here except that perhaps these people have clearly not opened up their panel box in YEARS.
You can read about more electrical problems here. If you have questions about the state of your electrical panel or any of the systems of your home, you can schedule a home maintenance inspection any time to get a kind of status report on everything in your house.
