Need advice - Outlet caught fire

I manged to get Leviton to refund my $100 deposit after I questioned their contractor's inflated and misleading pricing on the permit fee (they quoted me $575 for the permit, the city quoted me $140).

 

Very interesting thread! Makes me very glad the first thing I did after getting the PIP was to get in touch with friend who is an electrician and has done much of the electric work I have done over the past several years. He had put in a 20 amp circuit straight to my main box a few years ago with 3 outside outlets for running heater cables for ice on my old roof. Since I had a new metal roof installed right before I went with solar voltaic panels there was no real use for the circuit.

He brought one of the boxes down to my deck, changed the circuit to a 15amp breaker, and installed a GFI outlet for me. $60 The other two boxes are still in place and are hooked up, but I won't be ever using them for anything. Should I sell the house, who ever buys it can still use the two boxes at the roof and a timer (no longer actively used) for "Holiday Displays" if they ever felt the need... Money well spent I think!

 

The answer, either way, is that the plug was bad ... so in the end it doesn't matter whether the house was 40yrs old, or 100yrs old, or whether you used an extension or not.

 

If there is anything I've learned about home wiring/plumbing/anything is never presume that whoever built it did it correctly or safely. I had an electrician run a dedicated line from my breaker to the outlet where I wanted to plug in my Prius Prime so that I could be almost 100% sure to not have any issues.

 

i ran an extension cord out my basement window, because i didn't trust the outlet in the garage

 

Tradesman who resurfaced our wood floor didn't trust our wallplugs to power his rotary sander. No problem, he just used alligator clips on our main breaker box. I don't recall seeing any gloves and he didn't turn off the power while attaching his power cord. Wonder if he attached before or after a breaker...

 

That's why I don't trust anything is ever in its correct place in a house. Tradesman do stuff like that all the time and then bury it behind a wall/floor/ceiling. I once found a gas line all the way on the third floor of a building (in a converted attic) behind a wall. Best I could tell, it was from an old gas-lighting system where, when they replaced it with electric, was just capped and buried in the wall. The worst part was the line was still alive and full of gas! Needless to say I tracked it to where it started in the basement and capped it there.

 

i found a live electric wire buried inside a wall

 

Same guy who used alligator clips on our main box also found a live wire under the floor. His tool of choice was a saw...