Fuse box fix

The other week we had a peculiar problem come up. It was after nightfall and we were preparing to make a foray to the Land of Nod, and the wife had already shuffled off to the bedroom. I was busy brushing my teeth when I got one of those, "Honey, something's wrong here," shout outs.

"The light just went out here in the bedroom."

At day's end, my thinking mechanism is never at its best. By the time I could ponder the "why did that happens" and stumble my way to the bedroom, the light had mysteriously turned itself back on. A couple of days later, the complaint resurfaced – this time, the light wouldn't turn on. I suspected perhaps a "bum bulb" and was about to start into the fixture, but I needed more light on the subject. Reaching up to the ceiling light switch, I was mentally illuminated when that light wouldn't illuminate. Obviously more here than a bad bulb.

I racked my brain to recall if I'd recently drilled any holes or driven in any screws that might be responsible for setting off a loss of power to the lighting circuit down in the bedroom, put drew a blank. So off to the fuse box, where nearly having to stand on my head to read the circuit tags, started to pull the fuse – only to have the lights pop back on. "Ah, just a loose fuse," I chortled.

Yeah, and I'm a loose nut.

Because sure enough, within days, the bedroom blackout returned. This time I pulled the fuse out for a closer inspection. The fuse is one of those contemporary plastic bladed style fuses, and a quick look through the window on the fuse didn't show anything suspicious, but a closer inspection of the blades revealed blackened pitting on the blades. The tell-tale signs of electrical arcing, brought out by a not-so-tight connection.

In a "what's to do now," situation, I thought about disconnecting the battery power to the fuse box and taking after the fuse clips in the box with emery cloth. I've dealt a "temporary fix" to such problems in a shore-power breaker box, but always sweat bullets about possible outcomes of such a stunt. I pondered drilling out the rivets that held the fuse clips and trying to get a replacement clip. But then my own light came on – there were a couple of "spare" fuse clips in the box.

So I simply removed the hot wire from the "downstream" side of the offending fuse clip and hooked it up to one of the "open" fuse clips. With a fresh, unpitted fuse, I soon had the lighting circuit lit up again, with no qualms about safety.