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Home fuse box vs breaker box.

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Considering how most ppl tell me to use fuses on my solar system I was wondering why homes don't use fuses? I have been looking it up but all I can find is that its safer than fuses. However if a breaker fails you can set your home on fire, a fuse can not do that. If it is a case of ppl using the wrong size fuse the same can be dune with a breaker. Try putting a 50a breaker on 16awg wire and see what happens to you.
So why do homes only have breaker and not fuses?
 
A large breaker (200 amps) is still small and reuseable. Not sure how much a 200amp fuse would cost.

Part of it is probably that fuses are one time use versus breakers are not.

I'd not know which one is "safer"... Cars use fuses...mostly. But at higher voltage on EV's I believe they use blowable connections of some sort.

It also doesn't help that more current breakers have other added things, like GFCI functions built in.
 
In the past houses did use fuses. These were edison base, the same as a common light bulb. Unfortunately all fuses used the same socket size. The result is that people would put in 30 amp fuses in place of the far more common 20 amp fuses and many homes were burned down as a result. Studies prove that far fewer people will open a breaker box and replace a breaker with a bigger one than just screwing in a fuse of the incorrect size. Breakers were pushed in the 1930’s and by the 1950’s fuses were no longer used in buildings , everything had switched to breakers. Many lives were saved and far fewer buildings burned down. In today’s time you cannot buy insurance for your home if you still have fuses. Your insurance carrier will require you to have a circuit breaker panel installed.

Every study has proven that breakers are safer than fuses in a household situation.
 
On a DC system fuses are used as good DC breakers are very expensive. Cheap fuses are far safer than cheap breakers. Very good quality breakers are not cheap. I have more than $500.00 in very high quality breakers in my off grid system. Multiple inverters and multiple charge controllers.

My longest power outage in 25 years was 10-15 minutes to switch out a failed inverter and switch in another....
My system is far from typical, 100% redundant on everything
 
Tecnodave said:
In the past houses did use fuses. These were edison base, the same as a common light bulb. Unfortunately all fuses used the same socket size. The result is that people would put in 30 amp fuses in place of the far more common 20 amp fuses and many homes were burned down as a result. Studies prove that far fewer people will open a breaker box and replace a breaker with a bigger one than just screwing in a fuse of the incorrect size. Breakers were pushed in the 1930’s and by the 1950’s fuses were no longer used in buildings , everything had switched to breakers. Many lives were saved and far fewer buildings burned down. In today’s time you cannot buy insurance for your home if you still have fuses. Your insurance carrier will require you to have a circuit breaker panel installed.

Every study has proven that breakers are safer than fuses in a household situation.
Click to expand...
SO the resin we use breakers is because many ppl are stupid and lazy. Stupid by putting the wrong size fuse in and setting the houses of fire. Lazy because breakers are harder to install than a fuse so they just don't do it.

Am I in the ball park here?
 
A lot of people will not open a circuit breaker box ...fear of electricity, don't know. It is very easy to plug in an oversize fuse....yeah lazy, maybe thinking the money to really fix it could be spent elsewhere, cheap fix, but the consequences can be horrible watching your house burn to the ground. I just spend the money and be done with it. I really do not like fixing the same thing again, got better things to do, fix it right and move on to something fun.
 
Tecnodave said:
In the past houses did use fuses. These were edison base, the same as a common light bulb. Unfortunately all fuses used the same socket size. The result is that people would put in 30 amp fuses in place of the far more common 20 amp fuses and many homes were burned down as a result. Studies prove that far fewer people will open a breaker box and replace a breaker with a bigger one than just screwing in a fuse of the incorrect size. Breakers were pushed in the 1930’s and by the 1950’s fuses were no longer used in buildings , everything had switched to breakers. Many lives were saved and far fewer buildings burned down. In today’s time you cannot buy insurance for your home if you still have fuses. Your insurance carrier will require you to have a circuit breaker panel installed.

Every study has proven that breakers are safer than fuses in a household situation.
Click to expand...

Not everywhere. Friend of mine bought a house with a fuse box, no issues, though it was flagged as outdated and should be replaced. We did replace it with a breaker box anyway, but he wasn't required to.

The other issue with edison base fuses though is some people would stick a copper penny in the socket to bypass the "nuisance" blown fuse. Talk about a fire hazard, worse than a wrong size fuse!
 
Tecnodave said:
fear of electricity, don't know. It is very easy to plug in an oversize fuse.
Click to expand...
Or my kids great grandparent’s house that had folded tinfoil under a 20A fuse since the 1970s because it would blow regularly when they ran the percolator depending on what other stuff was running on their 60A rated entrance fuse box!!!!
 
PsychoticEpisode said:
SO the resin we use breakers is because many ppl are stupid and lazy. Stupid by putting the wrong size fuse in and setting the houses of fire. Lazy because breakers are harder to install than a fuse so they just don't do it.

Am I in the ball park here?
Click to expand...

For someone with a rather "haphazard" or "not quite up best practices guidelines" patchwork system, aren't you being a little judge-y? ?

There are people who think they know better than the pros or are at least willing to take the risk.

Household AC breakers (low current) are cheaper, easier and safer.
 
PsychoticEpisode said:
Considering how most ppl tell me to use fuses on my solar system I was wondering why homes don't use fuses?
So why do homes only have breaker and not fuses?
Click to expand...
Back in the 60's I watched my father, an electrician, use various "fuse alternatives". One of which was the 250 amp shown above and another was a good ole copper penny, not sure of the Amp rating on the old pennies. We did not become a statistic but (not my father's doing) our neighbor's garage did.
Today I am putting together a small solar system which includes both fuses and breakers. The Class-T Fuse was introduced to me here in the forum and has changed my way of thinking; especially with these newfangled high amp batteries.
Tecnodave mentioned redundancy to me a while back and now I am I am building redundancy into my system. Too many folks decide they don't have the space or money for an extra level of safety. Some of those folks have had very bad days.
 
Both are equally safe if used properly, CB are more idiot proof.

Fun story. One day a customer came to me and said our Williams Space Shuttle pinball machine was on fire. I ran over to it and sure enough the playfield was invisible due to smoke. I unplugged it and 2 of us hauled it outside to burn out or cool down.
It cooled down and we set about investigating what went wrong.
Long story short, someone had replaced a fuse with a piece of nail and the transformer had cooked itself.
 
AC circuits. It is more common, than we think, in a S&B house to have a small short. We used to have boxes of glass front fuses and also cartridge fuses for such mishaps. But then switched ac circuit breaker was invented. and manufactured at reasonable cost. Now no more pennies on the base of glass fuses. Just flip your switch and try it again. It is easy to interrupt an alternating current if not in the 10,000's of volts. Much more difficult to interrupt the dc current. That is why this Abattoir uses fuses for larger dc circuits and reserves the circuit breakers for smaller branch circuits less than 30 amperes.
 
So if the problems was people suing the wrong fuse why not just make the fuses different shapes so you cant use the wrong one?
 
They did do that - different size bases to prevent a 30A from screwing into a 15A socket for example - but they are not resistant to the wad of foil or other such measures.

Plus you can fit more breakers in the same space. And breakers can be reset. And for AC stuff, breakers are plenty fast.
 
Re the discussion above:
Looking to install a breaker instead of a fuse box and fuse (main battery line), I checked this one, recommended in one of Will's videos: 250A Circuit Breaker
Looking at the chart, it seems that this breaker is going allow for 500A (200%) to flow for 10-30 seconds through my 4/0 wire before tripping, and 750A to flow for 5-15 seconds.
Am I capturing the data wrong? This doesn't sound like a scenario I'd like to have...
I could only assume that fuses should be quicker to blow.
 
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