Understanding Electrical Safety Equipment: The Home Circuit Breaker
What's the most important safety feature in your home?
Your first aid kit? Fire extinguisher? Perhaps even your home insurance plan?
These are all good guesses, but like most safety equipment, they are reactive rather than proactive. They help homeowners respond to emergencies, not prevent them.
The circuit breaker, however, is the first line of defense towards preventing electrical accidents – one of the most common causes of home fires and workplace injuries in the United States.
Most electrical accidents can be prevented with a greater understanding of basic electrical safety principles and the tools that put those principles into practice. Of these, electrical breakers are the most useful (and often least understood) safety feature in the average home.
We're going to cover circuit breaker technology from the ground up, so read on to find out how you can check your old circuit breakers for damage, replace faulty ones, and identify major circuit breaker types.
2. Electrical load refers to any device that draws power – your home's lights and appliances are
all examples of loads.
"An electrical load is an electrical component or portion of a circuit that consumes electric
power."
Electrical engineers install circuit breakers to prevent you from accidentally drawing an
unsafe electrical load from your municipal grid. When the load approaches a critical point,
the breaker trips, cutting off the flow of electricity through the circuit, and preventing unsafe
levels of power consumption from occurring.
What's the Difference Between a Circuit Breaker and a Fuse?
If your home was built in the 1960s or earlier, your electrical panel might not have circuit
breakers at all, but fuses. Electrical safety can also be achieved with fuses, although modern
fuses are typically installed on appliances – not on residential, commercial, or industrial
electrical panels.
Fuses achieve the same result as circuit breakers – preventing the flow of electricity in
unsafe conditions – but do so in a different way. Fuses incorporate a small piece of metal
that melts when exposed to unsafe levels of electricity, while circuit breakers simply operate
a mechanism that can be reset afterwards.
A fuse needs to be replaced every time it blows. A circuit breaker, on the other hand, can
usually be reset manually.