Arc Faults

I was at Lewiston Regional Technical Center earlier this year in the electrical program working over in the plumbing workshop on a project that our teacher assigned J.T., Reginald, Parker, and I.

All four of us went to our lockers and got our tools and went back into our shop to get the supplies we needed. Like, drills, screws, connectors, wires, conduits, etc. anything that would help us on our project. After going to our lockers and workshop to get the supplies we headed over to the plumbing room to look at what we are dealing with. After looking over the work place looking for anything unsafe or out of place, we went to work. J.T. and I started running the MC (Metal Clad) from the junction box to the receptacles that we were installing. After securing the MC against the studs all the way to the boxes that we were installing J.T. and I started wiring the receptacles. As J.T. and I were doing all the work, Reggie and Parker were messing around and not helping us. Our teacher already knew that Park and Reggie always mess around so he told J.T. and I that we had to let them do some work since J.T. and I were doing it all ourselves. After we finished running the MC and wiring all the proper receptacles we put the covers on and finished up and cleaned up everything we were ready to power it up and see if it functions properly. But that day we ran out of time in the class and had to go back to Oak Hill High School for another class. The next day we came back to Lewiston Regional Technical Center we went through class almost until the end of the day when we spend the last hour to 2 hours of class working on projects throughout the school. J.T. and I walked to the plumbing room seeing what Reggie has messed up because J.T. and I heard that Reggie has created and Arc Fault. An Arc Fault is a high power discharge of electricity between two or more conductors. In Simple terms, the wires apart of this same cable run as these conductors needed to be reran because they were completely toast and could not be reused. So once J.T. saw he told us we needed to rerun the MC that was ruined and wire these receptacles again. So everyone reran the wires and fixed it all back up. By this time class was over again so J.T. and I had to go back to Oak Hill. The next time we came back we found out another kid in our group created another Arc Fault but a different way. At this point J.T. and I were getting really annoyed and just wanted to be done this project that we were on and move on to something else. So then we found out what the problem is and it was a bad splice. A splice is the joining of two or more conductors together tightly to make a good connection. Then putting a wiring nut on it to make sure there is no exposed copper because the wires are insulated. We found out Parker in our group made a bad splice and it was not tight enough and one of the wires came out of the splice causing another Arc Fault. So we had to rerun another piece of MC and this time it was a longer piece which was like 20 feet long and the last one was 3 feet long. So we reran the MC and wired everything back up.

After wiring everything back up and taking our Lock-Out Tag-Outs off the circuits that we had tagged out so no power was going to the circuits we were working on, we tested if everything worked good this time and we have no issues. So we turned on all the circuits and saw that everything worked fine and it was finally good. After this everyone in our class always jokes about what happened and always say how Parker and Reggie are going to create me Arc Faults. Now I just think it is funny that they made these mistakes so many times because I was not working on that project anymore. It used to be frustrating to have to redo all the work because of a few kids making mistakes, but I made it through it by just laughing at what happened and not getting too annoyed over it.

Photo by Carbon Arc on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA