Author -
Submitted By -capacitor control
This near miss concerns a wiring error in a capacitor control meter pan. An error occurred when during a new installation job the hot and neutral leads to the capacitor control's meter pan were inadvertently reversed. When the primary fuse cutouts were closed, the control transformer blew up. Reversing the hot and neutral leads, in effect shorted the secondary side of the small 1 kva transformer. Since the transformers secondary circuit was not fused, the primary circuit saw it as a dead short. The resulting heat caused the transformer's internal gases to violently expand causing the transformer to explode. Fortunately, no one was hurt.