panther surge protector fix

This panther surge protector broke my router. Sa a background, read about my broken router here.

Now Here are pics of the surge protector. I've been using this for almost a year before it exhibited any symptoms.





This is the socket that has a problem.



Those sockets are designed for tool free assembly. They are designed to use solid wire instead of stranded copper wire. To assemble it all you need is to insert the solid wire into the hole and the spring loaded contact will grab onto it. Other designs have screws and you wrap the wire around the screw then tighten the screw.

Now lets look at the hole.

The left one is the hole in question while the right one is a normal hole. Unlike the normal gibbous moon shape, the broken one is a ragged crescent moon shape. So the tip of the contact is broken. This means the wire is free to wiggle around in the hole. This is what caused my problem. Unplug a plug from other sockets and this causes stress which pulls the contact away from the solid wire, causing a spark. The fix is simple



Move the wire from the broken hole (red arrow) to another working hole (blue arrow)