Found: Live Wire in the Wall

My family has been living in the same house for six years, almost to the day.  Since moving in we have found a few surprises, but by far the biggest and worst occurred on Friday night.

Since February we noticed a black spot on the laminate flooring against an outside wall of the house in one of the upstairs bedrooms.  Thinking it was mould, I wiped it clean but it reappeared.  Last week we were thinking about repainting this bedroom, so my husband decided to investigate the spot by removing the baseboard in this area.

He found a power wire (shown here), which was originally for an electric baseboard heater, with its end wrapped in now charred black electrical tape.  These wires, unknown to the previous owners and us, continued to be “live" at the end.  The black mark we kept seeing was the result of occasional arcing between the one live wire and the ground wire.  My husband took immediate steps to disable this hazard.

That night our family discussed how our God shielded us all these years, protecting us from a house fire that could easily have been ignited by a tissue or other flammable item carelessly left near this wire on the other side of the wall.  While nobody would want to find such a wire in the wall, we are grateful that this risk could be addressed before something terrible happened.