I'm convinced that only the trusty hardware man stands between certain people and catastrophe. Either through ignorance, stupidity or excessive frugality, calamitous plans are hatched everyday by the homeowning public. Plans which left undeterred, will result in mayhem. I heard a coworker say this to a customer today. "Sure you can do that if your plan is to burn the house down." The reply was, "For real?" This customer wanted to know if she could just put a 30 amp fuse in her fuse box because the 15 amp fuses kept blowing. We answer this question a lot. Many of the homes in our area are old and still have fuse boxes, as opposed to circuit breakers, so we sell a lot of fuses. Most people don't really understand why there are fuses in an electrical circuit anyway. It is quite simple. The only reason for a fuse or a circuit breaker is to keep you from overloading a circuit and causing a fire. When a fuse blows, it means that there is too much current passing through the wiring at a given moment, given the size (called its gauge). In the absence of the correct sized fuse, overloading the circuit makes the wire overheat and become a fire hazard. Aren't you glad you asked? Oh, you didn't? Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky