What's That Burning Smell?
inthewilderness.net
inthewilderness.net
Their problem was that one of the screws got loose, and their suggested fix was to re-tighten them 6 month after installation. This is a good idea. I'd also suggest using wire ferrules and not ignoring blackened wires and smells from high-current electronics.
Also, and particularly in high current circuits like these, fuses generate significant heat on their own, at the connection points.
The better bet is to look to conservative standards (like ABYC for the marine industry) and follow their rules for wire termination. In this case that would be properly crimped ring terminals over simply wrapping stranded cable around a screw. That said I am sure the NEC has something to say about domestic solar installations.
Mag breakers and fuses won't help. A thermal fuse could work,provided it was thermally bonded to the bad connection. So you'll need a lot of thermal fuses - one at every potential bad connection.
The thermal overload breaker won't help here, because it only trips when the current is above breaker rating. And one would install at least a 100A breaker into a circuit rated for 100A, or it'll just trip all the time.
(You can see the detailed curve on datasheet, example page 2 here [0]. It is surprisingly slow - for 1.5X overload, it takes >10 minutes to trip).
The problem was because of bad connection on 100A line. We can talk about mistakes made here, but lack of breaker was not one of them.
[0] https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/products/electrical-...
It happens when it gets too hot. Principle of Operation: The Bimetallic Strip Mechanism:
https://www.haipart.com/news/thermal-trip-unit-in-circuit-br...
> If the current exceeds the rated load for a prolonged period, the heat causes the bimetallic strip to bend.
> The unit trips after a delay inversely related to the magnitude of the overload; the greater the current, the faster the trip.
The heat is generated by the breaker itself, from the current. Maybe it'll trip slightly faster if the wire is very hot, but I say it's unlikely - the thermal resistance on a regular breaker is very low, and wire is not a very great heat conductor either.
And even if breaker was for some reason reacting on wire temperqture? Look at the original post. You can easily see how far the heat traveled simply by seeing where the insulation got blackened. It looks like just a few cm - nowhere close to get to the other end of the wire, which was in the breaker. The system had breaker, and it could not detect this condition.
(There are special "thermal fuses" which react on the external temperature, but they are very distinct from the regular circuit breaker, and they must be attached directly to the device emitting heat, like a motor. No one attaches those to the regular terminal strips)
Why do you think this?
>You can easily see how far the heat traveled simply by seeing where the insulation got blackened. It looks like just a few cm
Why do you think this? Copper is excellent at thermal conductivity, only beaten by silver.
> When electrical current flows through the circuit, the strip heats up due to resistive heating.
This picture [0] from post ("Toasted Wires") shows the temperature damage. As you can see, the insulation damages was only at the very end of wires. Most of the wire are intact, meaning only the very end heated up. The other picture [1] shows the same
[0] https://i0.wp.com/inthewilderness.net/wp-content/uploads/202...
[1] https://i0.wp.com/inthewilderness.net/wp-content/uploads/202...
I hope it's not too close to my solar system!