Have you ever seen this before?

We have Cisco POE to power our Cisco phones. One of my customers called to say that her phone didn't work any more. After doing some simple trouble shooting, I went into the wireing closet and found this:



The burn mark turned out not to be soot but rather the heat sensitive lable is showing the heat as it worked its way up.

If you had asked me if an RJ-45 could short and burn, I would have said that its not possible.

Not often, but more than once have I seen this, yep.

I saw something similar to this once but it was user malfunction.

A home owner thought POE meant you could hook 120v to the Ethernet. They tried to power a shop vac on the other end. It was much more spectacular than this though.

Lochekey said:

I saw something similar to this once but it was user malfunction.

A home owner thought POE meant you could hook 120v to the Ethernet. They tried to power a shop vac on the other end. It was much more spectacular than this though.

Click to expand...

Now that is awesome. There is someone who has no idea about either data wire or mains electric. Wow.

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When I saw it, I couldn't even explain it to my boss. I went to her office and asked if she would just follow me. She had the same problem when she went to her boss and then the network guys. Everyone just had to see it for themselves.

Lochekey said:

I saw something similar to this once but it was user malfunction.

A home owner thought POE meant you could hook 120v to the Ethernet. They tried to power a shop vac on the other end. It was much more spectacular than this though.

Click to expand...

"User malfunction" is putting it kindly. But the curious thing to me is they must have done some wiring adaptation on the shop vac cord to be able to mate it with the ethernet cable. You'd think someone with that much smarts would no more about the rest of the electrical equation. Maybe they were high on something.

trents said:

"User malfunction" is putting it kindly. But the curious thing to me is they must have done some wiring adaptation on the shop vac cord to be able to mate it with the ethernet cable. You'd think someone with that much smarts would no more about the rest of the electrical equation. Maybe they were high on something.

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I can picture a "dongle" from RG-45 to 110. If I could photochop I'd post one up real quick.

The older gentleman had landed all of the houses Ethernet wires into a single junction box and was supplying it from a single 14/2 romex protected by a 15 amp breaker. He had then rigged an adapter from a rj45 to a standard extension cord end. He was then using this adapter throughout the house to plug his tools in.

Lochekey said:

The older gentleman had landed all of the houses Ethernet wires into a single junction box and was supplying it from a single 14/2 romex protected by a 15 amp breaker. He had then rigged an adapter from a rj45 to a standard extension cord end. He was then using this adapter throughout the house to plug his tools in.

Click to expand...

And it worked? for a while.

It worked for awhile until he put a heavy enough load on it to burn up the wall jack. He had three solids from each wire as hots, the three matching striped wires as neutral and the green and striped green as ground. it was wired with 24 awg cat 5 so each wire was rated for about 3.5 amps or about 10.5 amps total. He did okay with small things but when he ran a 12 amp shop vac on the circuit it was just to much. Luckily the wires held up but the wall jack he was connected to failed and started to melt which caused the pins to short. Luckily the breaker tripped before the wires went up in the walls as well.

I thought about making a dongle up so I could post a picture of it but I was afraid I would give someone the wrong idea, this was one error that does not need repeating.

The old geezer did have some electrical smarts but poor judgment it would seem. Do you think that arrangement would qualify for a UL sticker?