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Homebuyers Inspection Service
A complete Home Inspection Service
(413)-599-4948
(860) 265-4745
Serving western and central
Massachusetts & Connecticut.
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Federal Pacific electric service Panels
It is strongly recommended such panels be replaced.
Federal Pacific Electric "Stab-Lok" service panels and breakers are a latent hazard
and can fail, leading to electrical fires. The problem is that some double-pole (240-Volt)
FPE circuit breakers and possibly also some single-pole units simply may not work.
We also have reports that independent of the breaker problems, there have been panel
and panel-bus fires and arcing failures in some equipment. The failure rates for these
circuit breakers were significant and are documented in the CPSC study. Additional
independent testing and research are on-going.
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Supposing the circuits in your home were fed by a fuse box, with screw-in (Edison base) fuses. You may have seen these in some homes. You may also know about the common (but unsafe) practices of over-fusing (installing a higher-amperage fuse) or putting a penny in the fuse socket behind the fuse itself. These actions were taken to deal with the nuisance of fuses frequently blowing on overloaded circuits, or to deal with the lack of a spare fuse. Now, let's assume that an inspector notes some over-fusing and pennies behind some fuses, and waves the warning flag that it is a hazardous condition - a “safety defect”. Inspectors, electrical contractors, and even realtors would agree that these conditions constitute a hazardous condition and should be corrected immediately. Red-flagging the Federal Pacific Electric (“FPE”) Stab-Lok® panel is essentially the identical warning; it is the exact equivalent of having more than 1/3 of the circuits over-fused and/or with pennies behind the fuses.
Failure to trip properly under overload and/or short circuit is the basic safety defect of the FPE breakers. For example, if an overload or short circuit occurs in the clothes dryer or the circuit feeding it, the breaker is expected to trip open to minimize the resulting fire hazard. But, if it is an FPE Stab-Lok® two-pole breaker, extensive testing (by FPE, CPSC, UL, and others) has demonstrated that it cannot be depended on to trip properly. In the CPSC tests, a substantial portion of the FPE two-pole Stab-Lok® breakers, the type that would feed the dryer circuit, failed to operate properly. A significant portion of them jammed and would not trip at all, no matter what overload current was applied. Additional test data shows that there are also problems with the FPE Stab-Lok® single-pole breakers and combination breaker/GFI units.
This type of safety defect becomes important if and when there is a short circuit or substantial overload in the downstream circuit. Most breakers in a home are never called upon to trip, and the homeowner's perception is that "the breakers work fine". The same observation could generally be made if there were no breakers (or fuses) at all, just a hardwired system. In the event of an electrical malfunction, however, our safety may depend on proper operation of the circuit breakers.
Additionally, there are safety problems in many of the FPE panelboards (panels), in which the breakers are installed. Some of the most common FPE Stab-Lok® panels are failure-prone due to marginal interconnections between the current-carrying components. The failing interconnections overheat at high current loading, and, in the worst case, fire ignites within the panel.
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For more infromation view the following web site
http://www.inspect-ny.com/fpe/fpepanel.htm
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Serving western and central Massachusetts & Connecticut.
Massachusetts:
Agawam, Belchertown, Brimfield, Chicopee, East Longmeadow, Easthampton,
Granby, Hampden, Holland, Holyoke, Longmeadow, Ludlow, Monson, Palmer,
South Hadley, Southampton, Northampton, Southwick, Springfield, Wales,
West Springfield, Westfield, Westhampton, Wilbraham, Springfield, Spld
Connecticut:
Enfield, Somers, Suffield, Stafford, Stafford Springs, Ellington, Vernon,
Tolland, Windsor, South Windsor, Windsor Locks, Granby, Tarifftville,
Bloomfield, Hartford, East Hartford, West Hartford, Union, Willington,
Simsbury, West Simsbury, Weatogue, Manchester, Wethersfield
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