"Elect e fried" lady bugs

[MossRoad]

I've a switch for overhead lights in one of my workshops that started acting erratically. I hate working on electricity ever since I shorted wires on a wall plug when I was about 4 years old.
The switch wouldn't turn off and was slowly smoking. Opened up and found about 10 dead lady bugs.
/edit - don't know why the pic shows up landscape until I click on it.

Couple questions/observations.

All the knockouts appear to be in place in that box, so how did they get in there?

Ladybugs aren't known to eat wiring (they eat aphid, mostly)... did you see any damage to the wire?

I would guess the switch was bad/going bad, or, the wire connections to the switch weren't tight, and that caused the heat and switch to malfunction. Ladybugs are known to seek out warm spots, so it wouldn't surprise me to see them in there, however they got in.

Got a picture of the switch?

 

[ponytug]

@MossRoad most "Rainproof", aka 3R, enclosures have pretty substantial weep holes by design, and many that I have seen have screw holes used in other versions of the enclosure but open in the one in question.

Then there is my pump house which is down the hill from the power pole by 175' or so. It is about the size and shape of an outhouse. When we bought the place, inspected the pump controls and noticed a missing knockout, and put it on the mental fix list. In the "one thing leads to another" category, it was a large knockout, 1", 1.25"+/-. I didn't have any on hand, and the local places did not have it, so it got moved down the do list. Time passed, and one winter, our rainy season, I happened to open the pump house door, and immediately thought "OMG", followed by "WTF?"

All conduits leak, right? So when our ground saturates, there is a garden hose worth of water coming into the box at a significant flow and pressure, along the main power feed. The mystery of the missing knockout was explained as a necessary item to drain the box. Several electricians have declined to do anything as the mice don't get in, and it isn't a safety issue in their minds...

Luckily no lady bugs nor mice find it attractive...

All the best,

Peter

 

[MossRoad]

Yep. I just didn't see any obvious holes in the OP's picture for the ladybugs to get in.

Speaking of water, I went into a mech room for quarterly inspections week before Christmas, and saw water coming out under the door. Looked inside and there was a large electrical panel with a stream of water coming out of it. Always pleasant surprise!

Turned out the conduits in the box went outside between buildings, one of them separated under a lawn that was bowl-shaped right over it. Then it rained. It was basically a floor drain in the lawn.

They built a moat around the bowl and waited for it to dry out before making repairs.

 

[Fuddyduddy1952]

I repaired consumer electronics 43 years, mostly TVs. I could write a book.
In the early 1970s most TVs people had were still tube type. One service call on an RCA console customer said no picture, just making a loud noise.
I removed back and as soon as high voltage came up I heard loud arcing. So I removed one screw that opened the high voltage cage (flyback transformer). It was like a Frankenstein horror movie! A mouse had gotten inside. It was standing upright, arms outstretched and 30,000 Volts coming off the top of it's head to the 3A3 high voltage rectifier tube!
I unplugged TV and it fell onto their carpet...smoking & stiff as a board. There wasn't anything much to clean out with a shop rag but now the set worked fine. How it got in there is a mystery...but mice & insects can get into some amazingly small openings.

 

[Alan W.]

Buddy of mine called this week saying his heat pump was working fine but the outside fan would never shut off.
I had him check to see if the thermostat had gone bad by pulling it. Fan was still on. Told him the contacts were probably stuck on the outside unit.
Turns out a mud dauber had built above the contacts and a piece of the nest fell into the contacts jamming them together.
Instead of cleaning it out thoroughly his just knocked the piece free. This caused some of the nest to fall into the compressor contacts keeping it from running. Now as my granny always said he’s gotta lick his calf over again.