What Makes a Fuse Blow?
For those who still enjoy the charms of glass or ceramic fuses, there’s rarely a good time to blow a fuse. It usually happens at the end of an exciting football game or just before the killer in a mystery is revealed. When you blow a fuse, the search for a replacement overrides everything, but what causes a fuse to blow in the first place? The short answer is heat from an overloaded electrical circuit, but there’s more to it than that. That blown fuse may have saved the rest of your house from burning down. Electricity enters the average home at a certain strength, which electricians measure as voltage. For best results, that electrical current should flow through your house and back to the outside line without unusual high resistance. When you plug all of your electrical appliances into the sockets, however, you create a certain amount of resistance on the wires. How much actual electricity a particular device uses is measured in terms of amperage. A clothes dryer with a large electri
