Ooh, strange ahappenings.

Chris11

Continuing on wiring my old west town.....

From the 2500 watt inverter to the four 120 volt circuit breakers in the breaker panel is about 60 feet using 12 gauge UF wire. This breaker panel is in the Jail/sheriff's office.  Then using ordinary Romex 12 gauge along the wall, broken up by a few plugins, and onto the next building the doctor's office.  Same deal, wired along inside the wall with a few plugins, to the last plugiwhere the UF feeder takes over again, and  into the next building, the post office.  This distance from the breaker panel to the post office is probably another 60 feet.  Dunno if the distance is pertinent.  Now for the weird thingy....

At the first outlet box in the post office I was cutting off the excess UF wire.  Stupidly I forgot to turn off the circuit breaker.  Once the wire cutters hit the wires of course it sparked and shut off the power.  I thought, OK, go reset the breaker which I did.  That didn't restore power.  It turned out that one of the fuses, a 20 amp, in the inverter had blown.

Can someone please explain to me why the 120 volt circuit breaker didn't blow instead of the 20 amp inverter fuse which is so much further away?

Thanks, Chris

Photowhit

Resistance...

Breakers take a bit of time to 'blow' basically to heat up' the thin wire in a fuse takes no time to heat up.

Chris11

Ah thank you, interesting.  So I could have just saved the money on breakers and the panel and not bothered with them.