Circuit Breaker Model is Defective and Potentially Dangerous

Here is a very short summary of a very important article from the Dallas Morning News. If you live in an older home in North Texas you need to check your circuit breaker box to make sure it's not a Federal Pacific Stab-Lok model. I checked ours, and we're safe, but if you do have one of these models you are in risk of losing your home to a fire. Read the article for details and go check your breaker box.

The Dallas Morning News reports on "Federal Pacific Stab-Lok, a type of circuit breaker in thousands of North Texas homes that is now widely thought by engineers, electricians and house inspectors to be defective – and dangerous." Concerns began to surface about the circuit breakers thirty years ago, but "after testing the devices for about two years, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said the government lacked sufficient data to warrant a recall." More recently, however, "engineers studying them independently have found that the circuit breakers can overload and cause fires." According to one expert, there may be as many as "20 million homes nationwide" that still use the Stab-Lok circuit breaker. "If your house was built during the '60s, '70s or '80s, it probably has one of these breakers. About 90 percent of houses we see from that time have them," said one inspector.