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While the title “Burning Down the House” might be a good name for an 80’s pop song, it is not good to do in your real house!

This all is because I decided to clean out the crawl space. Under the addition of the house they put in just a crawl space instead of a full basement. The previous owners still had some assorted junk hiding up in there and I have ignored it for 2 years. Tonight I couldn’t ignore it any longer and it all had to go. So I setup my work lamps, 1000 watts of lights. Probably over kill for such a little space but I wanted to see. Then I got the shop vac out and plugged it into the same outlet. After a couple of hours cleaning up I was crawling back out of the crawl space and noticed an odd smell in the air. Looked over at the outlet where the lamp was plugged in at and saw these small flames leap out of the outlet, then a puff of smoke, then more small flames. I flew out of the crawl space and was across the room pulling the power cords out of the outlet. Thankfully this was enough to stop the flames.

After this picture was taken I cut the outlet off and capped the wires for now. Then I remembered a conversation I had with my father-in-law (an electrician) when he looked at our breaker panel. He stated we needed to replace the panel because it was the first residential breaker panel they ever made and they were a hunk of crap. And then he made some statement like, you don’t have to worry about blowing a breaker because they won’t go in that panel, it will just burn. The panel has already been set to replace this spring.