Wow what a story. Glad you have smoke alarms and they alerted you. Our local FD just installed free smoke alarms in our neighborhood, I got another one since they were giving them away but my main one is monitored by ADT.

You were also lucky you didn't burn yourself when you opened the garage door. I remember hearing that you shouldn't touch metal door handles in a fire, one of the first things to get hot so use a cloth or T shirt.

 

Glad you weren't hurt (physically). And nice to know that Dairyland took care of things.
I have litigated a number of cases involving extension cords - I've learned that they should only be used temporarily and only when properly sized. It's amazing how fast an extension cord can start a fire.

 

Glad everything turned out ok considering what could’ve happened.

 

Yepper. I had a house fire 10 years ago. Sucked but no one was injured. Fortunately our insurance company was first class. The only thing out of our pockets was the 1K deductible. They even paid for a rental house for 5 months during rebuilding.

 

Burned kitchen once while preparing fries - not fun for sure and yes a lot of clean up.

i would like to better understand how to avoid this with the charger. Can you elaborate a bit on cause of fire you mentioned and maybe share the switch that cause it and what to do to not experience it?

 

The golf cart charger was eventually found to be innocent in this. The failed item was a three into one adapter that I added at the end of the extension cord sometime in 2016. The forensics guys were able to look at a blackened puddle of melted rubber with the copper internals now visible. The three female sockets (one straight, one 90 degrees to the left and one 90 degrees to the right) were all still visibly connected together. However, on the male plug (forms an 'x' with the three female branches) showed a failure on one of the connections. They believe the adapter likely had a manufacturing flaw in the form of a weak connection, or possibly corrosion. Anyway, after a great deal of time in service, the flawed connection started heating up since it was essentially a 'resistor'. It degraded further, or corroded further over time and got progressively hotter. It eventually caught the rubber on fire. The fire spread from there. The adapter looked like a quality piece and had the usual approvals such as ULC and CSA. I had no idea it could be a time bomb. I do not ever plan to leave anything plugged into an extension cord for any length of time. They are best restricted to temporary use, adapters too. If I do use these things for a short time (Christmas decorations come to mind) I will make a point of feeling the connections periodically to see if anything is heating up. I believe this was a very rare event, but clearly it can and did happen. I hope this info is valuable for those like me who had no idea that something like this could work just fine for 3 or 4 years and then cause a fire.

 

Good info, thanks! Is this similar to your time bomb?

 

Damn.. Sorry to read about this.. Glad your ok though and sounds like when all finished you'll have a nicer home and a great appreciation for it.

 

man that is so terrible. Glad everyone is ok tho. Hopefully insurance will help out

 

Holy crap, that sucks. So glad to hear that you and your family are OK.