LAYTONSVILLE, Md. — There may be a hidden danger in your home that you’ve never considered: an electrical box carrying deadly current -- unlocked -- and easily exposed by a child’s prying fingers.
Tens of thousands of the boxes have been installed, and up until now, there has been no legal requirement for them to be locked. But one man is on a mission to get the boxes secured.
Disabled master electrician Tommy Davis has spent nearly four years now trying to get the word out. His tremors keep him from working professionally, but they haven’t stopped him advocating.
"If you pull down this handle, flip this latch, the door can open. Everything inside there is highly energized," Davis said, flipping open the box mounted well within a child's reach on the side of a home here in Laytsonville in Montgomery County.
To show the risks, the electrician is doing just what he worries a kid could do, probing what’s called a knife’s blade disconnect switch and tapping the intense current.
"240 volts of unlimited ampacity," he said while his volt-ohm-millimeter tester squealed. "Voltage burns you. Current is what kills you.”
Crews have installed the boxes on homes across the region and around the world for swimming pools, heat pumps, and solar panels and HVAC systems.
Davis said almost none of them are locked.
"These things are the only widely use piece of electrical equipment that doesn’t require a tool to open," he said.
"This was a total surprise to me," Sheila Lieberman said. "If I hadn’t met Tommy, I still wouldn’t know about it."
She had solar panels installed on her Laytonsville home a couple of years ago and said no one mentioned the unsecured electric box. “I was shocked!” she said, when she found out.
"The idea that a child could be killed at my house was just beyond," Lieberman said.
The solar industry downplays the risks and portrays Davis as a bully and a gadfly. The regional executive director declines to be interviewed in a story that included Davis.
But David Murray, executive director of the MDV-SEIA, the Maryland, Delaware, D.C. and Virginia solar electric industry association said no child has ever been hurt by getting into one of the boxes.
"Do we need to wait until a child is injured before we take action?" Davis said.
Davis does have one of the country’s leading electrical code experts on his side.
"If you can take a box that’s accessible to children and you can open the cover and the kids can put their fingers in there, clearly, that takes it to a level that’s not really acceptable," Mike Holt, who trains electricians and wrote the textbook many use to get certified, said.
Davis said the fix is simple: Just put a screw and a nut or a zip tie into the latch that’s already built into the outside cover of the box.
"It was as simple as screwing a nut onto a bolt," Lieberman said. "And now it’s secure I feel better."
Murray of solar industry association said the boxes have been used millions of times around the world without incident. He’s not sure it’s smart for homeowners to even touch the outside of the boxes to lock them up.
But Davis got Maryland to pass a law this year that all new installations will have to be secure. And next year’s National Electrical Code will mandate all new boxes require a tool to be opened.
What's not clear is what will happen with all the boxes that have already been installed.