interesting website

[Rob Amaral]

http://www.electrical-forensics.com/Ene ... utral.html

[Marc]

Scary, but it would seem that a structure wired with conductors intended only for 240 volts max would experience damage on a much wider scale by both current overload and insulation failures with 7,200 volts on the neutral. The entire installation would become toast in an instant. Those distribution lines are capable of supplying an enormous amount of power.

Maybe the engineer was only tasked with determining liability and stopped when that was done.

Marc

[Jim Katen]

I don't understand the sequence of events relating to the transformer in the third paragraph. It doesn't make any sense.

Is he suggesting that there was a second squirrel that caused a line-to-neutral fault at the transformer at the moment of the fire, two days after another squirrel caused a fault on a different transformer? Or is he suggesting that the second transformer was installed incorrectly and contained a fault that existed for two days before the fire started?

I don't understand his scenario.

[John Kogel]

I don't understand the sequence of events relating to the transformer in the third paragraph. It doesn't make any sense.

Is he suggesting that there was a second squirrel that caused a line-to-neutral fault at the transformer at the moment of the fire, two days after another squirrel caused a fault on a different transformer? Or is he suggesting that the second transformer was installed incorrectly and contained a fault that existed for two days before the fire started?

I don't understand his scenario.

I suspect the fuse or circuit breaker blew on the transformer, maybe from squirrel damage. The transformer was re-energized, then two days later it failed again, the neutral burned out, causing the fire?

Too bad a guy with a PhD couldn't write a better description. []