Federal Pacific Panels

How important is it to you get car insurance? Pretty important I would guess. Partly because it’s the law, but mostly because you want to protect your property. Not just your sweet 1975 AMC Gremlin, but also that other property we like to call money. Get in a car accident with another classic car like a 1978 Ford Pinto, and the cost of repair could mount into the hundreds! (No! Not hundreds!) Yes, hundreds.

So, to protect yourself you go out and get a little bit of Allstate, or Farmers, or Geico, or Fred’s Car Protection. Every month you send in your payment. You don’t even worry about car accidents. You’ve got insurance. Go ahead. Rear end my Gremlin. I’ve got insurance! (The Pinto guy never says that. Hit every other side of the Pinto, just not the rear end. Boom!)

So then the day comes. That pinto t-bones your Gremlin. No problem. You call your insurance agent. All those months of insurance payments pays off. Your agent jumps to it and takes care of all the details. No expense is spared. $261.84 in repair bills, and your Gremlin is back on the road.

But lets just say you didn’t do the Allstate, or Farmers, or Geico route. You chose Fred’s Car Protection. You call up old Fred.

“Hey, Fred. Howzit goin’?”

“O, real good. Real good. And you?” (Think Northern Minnesota accent)

“Well, not so good. Not so good, Fred. A Pinto just ran into my classic 1975 Gremlin, and I’m afraid the repairs may reach into the hundreds.”

…

“Hello, Fred? Fred?”

Bzzzzzzzz (that’s a dial tone noise)

You call back. And again. No answer. You just know you are now stuck with $261.84 to repair you 1975 classic AMC Gremlin. When you needed your insurance agent, Fred was nowhere to be found.

That is what a Federal Pacific Panel is like. You have it in your garage for years. You think it is there to protect your house from any electrical problems. You never give it a second thought. You sleep well at night. You let your children come into the house. You even have a hamster. All of them are safe and sound.

What you don’t know is that when trouble comes, like a short circuit, or an overloaded circuit, or your stove freaks out and starts to draw all the electricity in the city to itself… what you don’t know is that when trouble comes, your old Federal Pacific Panel will have a huge chance of not being there to answer the call when needed. Studies show that the Federal Pacific Panel fails up to 60% of the time. Wow! 60% of the time!!! Sometimes you can turn a Federal Pacific breaker off and it will still be on! In many cases wires will actually melt before a Federal Pacific breaker will trip, or automatically turn off! Can you say, fire!

There are a lot of exclamation points in that last paragraph, and rightly so! The Federal Pacific Panel is a deadly panel. I personally would never live in a house with one of those panels in it. If you’ve got one in your house, get rid of it. Call a licensed electrical contractor and get it changed out. The life of your hamster is worth whatever the cost. And your children will thank you, too. (Mommy, thanks for getting that ugly monster out of our garage!)