Toroidal transformer catastrophic failure.

[turretslug]

Originally Posted by Techman

The one that failed in the old substation under the building at work, probably dated from the 1950s and I missed the actual bang as I was working four floors above it - so yet to have the pleasure (or not) of a proper failure!

Maybe just as well you missed it, with the likelihood of a spray of hot PCB oil and generous waft of nasty smoke! Where I used to work, a typical grey lump of a stepdown transformer sat on the ground at the edge of industrial units, just a few feet away was a particularly fine, healthy-looking and abundantly-cropping pear tree that I'd always meant to harvest but never got round to. One day, the transformer leaked its many gallons of oil, saturating the surrounding ground- I gave up ideas of pear-harvesting after that....