This week, Jamie breaks down the often-overlooked danger of electrical overload, a leading cause of residential fires.

Jamie explores how silent electrical fires start, the subtle warning signs many people miss (like flickering lights or warm outlets), and the common mistakes that put homes at risk, such as overloading circuits or treating extension cords as permanent fixes. Listen for practical prevention tips and smart safety habits that will help you protect your property and enjoy real peace of mind.

Episode Highlights

1. Why electrical overload is a major (and underestimated) cause of house fires
2. The hidden warning signs of silent electrical fires you shouldn’t ignore
3. Common homeowner mistakes that put electrical systems under strain
4. Simple, proactive steps to improve electrical safety and reduce risk

Welcome to Thoughts from the Crawl Space, a podcast where our goal as home inspection experts is to support and serve our community.

Whether you're a homeowner, home buyer, real estate agent, or investor, we believe everyone deserves solutions to their homeownership challenges and inspiration along the way. Your path to success starts here. Welcome back to another episode of Thoughts from the Crawl Space.

We're continuing our series today on potential catastrophes in your house. Not to scare you, just to give you a heads up of what could happen and some tips on how to help prevent it.

So we're going to jump right in today with electrical overload, the silent fire starter. I get your attention. Nobody likes fires. We talk about smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms all the time.

Where to put them, how often to update them. But what really causes fires? Well, obviously, you knock a candle over, it starts. Napkin on fire, it spreads. Those are, those are obvious, right?

A cooking fire, grease goes out of control. But more often than not, the number one reason fire start is overload. And they can start silently.

And you don't know what's happening until it's caused a big problem. So your house can look perfectly normal and then you can see an outlet smoking.

Maybe you smell an outlet or you smell smoke and he's like, where is that smoke coming from? Maybe it's all in your head. Maybe the neighbor's burning leaves.

But it could be possible that something in your house is smoldering inside the house, inside the wall, inside the ceiling, somewhere you can't see it. Underneath could be a outlet strip with multiple heaters plugged into it or something like that. So most electrical fires start silently and slowly.

So here's some things you may see in your home that potentially could lead to a fire. Lights that flicker occasionally. Why would they flicker? Well, it could be a bad connection somewhere, a tripped breaker, a burning plastic smell.

One evening, we talked about burning before. If you smell it consistently, you need to get it checked out. Then all of a sudden, one.

Or you might have also warm outlets or buzzing outlets or buzzing breakers. Anything that happens that didn't used to happen, that's a sign. So take heed of it. Could start getting smoke from an outlet, scorched wall. Your.

Your switch all of a sudden looks scorched. You're like, what in the world? Well, it needs to be checked out. So what electrical overload really means.

So to break it down, simply too many devices pulling more current than the circuit can handle.

So especially on older 15amp circuits in older houses, they use a lot of 15amp circuits, and they use knob and tube wiring, which don't carry as much current as modern wiring does. And so you can quickly overload a circuit. Now, in theory, that breaker should. Should trip and stop any potential problem.

But if you have wires that are damaged, that may not happen. And the wire can overheat and it can burn before the breaker catches on and switches everything off.

So too many devices pulling more current than the circuit can handle. Number two, outdated wiring unable to support modern loads. Number three, damaged or loose connections increasing resistance.

When we open electrical panels, sometimes we'll see one of the neutral wires that is melted fairly significantly. And immediately it's like, whoa, we got a melted wire. Well, that's a problem. Most of the time that is just from being loose.

And so it's a fairly simple fix that an electrician can handle.

Not always, but in general, that's what it is because it gets loose, and that creates more resistance, which creates more heat than we want on that wire. Another thing that's a problem, extension cords or power strips used as permanent wiring. This is something we call out frequently.

All right, your garage door opener, it shouldn't be plugged in with an extension cord. There should be an overhead one right near the opener to use the plug that comes with the opener.

And if you have an older house and maybe you only have one outlet per room, and the modern needs are greater than what they were when that home was built. So now we have to run extension cords to reach everything that we want reached. Extension cords are never designed to be used permanently.

You might get away with it for a while, but it's not designed to be used permanently. It's a major fire starter.

And then on appliances, on circuits not designed for them, space heaters, microwaves, portable AC units, and hair dryers, those all take a lot of current. And if they're on a circuit that's not designed, if you're lucky, your breaker will trip or the fuse will blow.

If you're not lucky, the wire will burn, and then you have a bigger problem. So here's some hidden warning signs most people ignore. Some subtle indicators we've talked about before about.

In your relationship with your spouse, do you get the subtle hints that he or she leaves for you? Well, I hope you do, and I hope you get these subtle hints with your electrical system as well. Warm or hot outlets, sparking when plugging in.

It should not spark when you plug it in. Frequently tripping breakers. If you have to go down and trip the breaker, reset the breaker all the time, that's not right. It needs to be fixed.

Now the one caveat to that is if you have a GFCI protected out switch or outlet, maybe in your bathroom and your hands are wet, you touch it and it trips the breaker. That's a good thing. But other than that, you don't want to have to reset breakers all the time or replace fuses.

Buzzing from the outlets or the panel lights dimming when appliances start. So when your furnace kicks on or your well kicks on one of the higher draw appliances, do your lights dim?

That can indicate an imbalance in the electrical panel. Maybe all your power is being absorbed by one leg of the feeds coming in. Burn marks, Discoloration or melted plugs. A smell of hot plastic.

Why plastic? Well, the coating on these wires is especially modern wires is essentially plastic romex, a breaker that won't reset.

So if you go to try to reset a breaker and it trips again, you have a short in the line, you need to leave it alone. You need to call an electrician. So these aren't quirks in your electrical system, they're warnings.

So sometimes if you have an older house, you may get a chuckle out of some of the quirks with your old house. Don't go down that route with electrical plumbing.

Yeah, you know, you're not, you're not going to burn your house down with plumbing problems may have frustrations, but electrical is a lot more serious. So some things we typically find on inspections that are problems.

And if there is one area of an inspection that we find things on, on many houses, it's an electrical double tapped breakers. Breakers should have one wire going to them and not multiple overloaded power strips and daisy chained extension cords.

Even worse than extension cord is connecting extension cords. Especially with Christmas lights and especially if it's outside and maybe not even rated for exterior use.

Undersized circuits feeding high load appliances. Loose connections, Aluminum wiring with no antioxidant paste. Burn marks inside the electrical panel. Improper, do it yourself. Wiring missing.

Gfcis or afcis in critical areas. And that's just probably eight or nine of multiple things we can find with an electrical inspection.

A good electrical inspection is going to check all the outlets we can get to. It's going to check all the switches. It's going to check the electrical panel.

You're going to take the COVID panel off so you can look at the connections to the breakers. Make sure the breakers are sized properly. They have a right amount of wires going to them. There are no burn marks. It's grounded properly.

There's there's no rodents living there. You don't have any holes in the panel and on and on. So a lot of little things that home inspectors can look at.

Why are electrical fires especially dangerous? Well, this seems obvious, but they're especially dangerous because they start silently.

This is not something that announces that it's going to happen. They can start in a wall or an attic. You don't see them until it's too late.

Till all of a sudden the fire truck shows up and the roof is burning off your house and you don't even notice it in the house. If it starts in the attic. No smoke. Sometimes they just start. Just heat build up and heat can lead to fire and you don't have that smoke to warn you.

It can happen at night while people sleep. Scary but true. That's why you need high quality smoke detectors that you know work and are installed properly.

Outdated electrical systems weren't designed for today's devices. Think about the older style panels.

You might have had four or five circuits in that whole panel and now somebody comes in and they renovate the house and they use the old wiring that's still in the walls and they put in a newer panel and they add breakers and they add outlets and you are just overloading older wires, waiting for a problem to happen. So here's some high risk habits that lead to electrical overload and then we'll talk quickly about prevention tips.

So here's some homeowner well, failures using the cheapest power strips don't go cheap. Running space heaters on extension cords. Big no, no Plugging appliances into loose outlets.

If that outlet is loose we just talked about if it's loose, your connection has more resistance which leads to heat overloading. Holiday lights Running two big appliances like a toaster and a microwave on the same circuit.

Using backstabbed outlet connections and then storing flammable items near outlets or panels. So if your power strip looks like it's controlling a NASA launch, it's probably overloaded, right?

Just because there's six slots on it doesn't mean you should use all six. So here's some prevention tips for you and your electrical system. Some of this is a repeat from earlier, but it bears repeating.

Avoid plugging high demand appliances into the same circuit. Microwaves take a lot. It should have its own circuit. Don't add a space heater and a hair dryer.

Use dedicated circuits for heavy load appliances like the dryer, the oven, the H Vac, portable AC units. They should all have their own circuit. Replace damaged or warm outlets immediately. Don't rely on extension cords as permanent wiring.

Install AFCI breakers in bedrooms and living areas. Install GFCI outlets where required. So these are going to be where you have water potential. Kitchen, bathroom, garage and exterior. You know what?

Have an electrician come out and inspect everything. A couple hundred dollars, get them to come out there and just give you an assessment of where you stand electrically.

Would you rather pay a few hundred dollars and have some peace of mind than wonder what's going on and then consider upgrading the panel if it's outdated or maxed out? So I've given you a lot of things to think about to kind of tie this all together. That electrical overload is often invisible.

There's things you've been doing electrically that you know probably you shouldn't, or maybe after listening to this, you know you shouldn't. Multiple space heaters, overloading outlet strips, old wires with new appliances, that kind of thing. Small warning signs lead to big fires.

Modern electrical loads can overwhelm older systems. So that's why you get a home inspection. A home inspector can tell you what you need to know on these and they can give you advice.

It doesn't mean the whole house needs rewired. It means we need an assessment by an electrician to give you a true picture of what needs done here. So hope this helps.

Share this with someone that could use this. Someone that you know lives maybe in an older house with wiring issues. This could save their life. Talk to you next time. Thank you for listening.

This week you can catch up on the latest episode of the Thoughts from the Crawl Space podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. For more information about Gold Key inspection services, go to goldkeyinspect.com.