This clip was part of a repair video I was planning to do on a Breville convection oven. I started to work on the oven after lightning struck very close to our house during an intense thunderstorm. High winds during the storm caused a loose neutral situation at the electrical service entry. The result?
Well, what I thought was just a thermal fuse opening (which made the oven fail safely), actually had caused more damage, resulting in an isolation breakdown in the switched-mode power supply. When I was probing around with the voltmeter to check low-voltage rails, I heard a snap, and the display/interface board went dead. So, in my frustration, I set this up to see how much current it would pull when energized. It ended up instantly opening the 20A (10kA) breaker faster than the GFCI outlet could! This is likely due to it being an almost complete short circuit to ground.
Always treat everything as electrically live at a hazardous voltage (that's mains AC-powered) until you extensively test to ensure that it is, in fact, safe. This is especially true when working on anything that you are trying to repair, and think you already "know" what the issue is.
Thanks for watching!
