There’s a huge difference between a short and an open failure.
I had the main alternator output cable drop against the headers and melt. The short created actually made the car slow down, the drag from the alternator was that great.
Also, the ammeter pegged on D and started smoking, right in the dash.
Most impressive!
Perhaps it is a local thing. But everyone I know of refers to a damaged electrical cord or cable as having a “short” in it. Right or wrong it’s of common usage around here. Even the tech at the service garage referred to the cables as having a short in them.
So, in summary, pkbites, while not common, it’s not unheard of. I myself have had a negative battery cable go bad from corrosion inside the insulation, but the cable and car were pretty old, and the corrosion was down where the negative was grounded to the chassis, from water seeping under the insulation and working up the cable a bit. Any time I’ve had a problem with the positive, it was usually a loose connection and/or corrosion on the terminal, which if left untreated can cause failure of the cable itself, usually right at the terminal though. Anything more than an inch or two away from the ends of the cable is going to be damage caused by some other (probably) mechanical means which would most likely result in damaged insulation on the cable in that spot as well.
in general, most mechanics i know when speaking to another mechanic, take “a short” or “a shorted circuit” to mean ‘a short to ground’ or ‘power or ground being supplied to a circuit that, when properly operating, is supposed to have power or ground supplied to it, however getting it (the power or ground) from a fault external to but involving the circuit’.
the first of those definitions is one that can start fires or blows fuses, it also can just provide a ground to a circuit that typically sees ground, just not through the problem path to ground (see my second example below). the second of those definitions can make for a circuit working when it’s not designed to, but not necessarily blowing fuses or starting fires. i say necessarily because said shorted circuit can leave a load with either no overload protection or the wrong overload protection.
examples could be -
a radio power supply wire making contact with some other circuit that’s constantly hot. the radio would work all the time in that example. the radio also could have too high an amperage potential to it now if the circuit that shorted to it has a higher amp fuse than what the radio circuit calls for, which is where the potential for fires could come in to play. this would be a hot short.
or a door switch circuit wire maybe becoming disconnected from the door switch & touching the body of the car. the dome light would be ‘stuck’ on so long as this ground connection was maintained. this would be a ground short.
when talking to the general public, we (most mechanical professional types) take “a short” to mean any problem with an electrical component or circuit. educating the public on what is & isn’t a short is an exercise in futility & time that could be best spent figuring out the problem instead.
to the OP. i say that’s too little info given to go off of. seeing as how it was under $50 it couldn’t have been too big a problem whatever it was.
As you mention, corrosion can certainly affect the reliability of an electrical system. But it almost always occurs at a connector or termination; corrosion causes the contact resistance to increase to the point that the load is getting insufficient voltage.
Now it’s certainly possible the copper wire itself can corrode in the middle of the length, resulting in increased resistance. But it would have to get really bad before it increased the resistance to the point that the circuit failed.
It’s not a local thing. First, given an unknown electrical problem the non-expert assumes it is a ‘short’, even the expert may use the term when the problem is unknown. Once known, the layman doesn’t much distinguish between ‘shorts’, ‘opens’, and any other type of problem and will call it a ‘short’. This is just like people calling every problem with their computer a ‘virus’.
It’s a Jeep. Everything can break on it.
Yes. Or like when someone’s house gets broken into and they say they were robbed. It’s a generalization form of speech that a lot of us are guilty of even when we know better.
Did the house breaker steal something? Then they were robbed. It’s one of the plain dictionary meanings of the word.
It’s more than that, though - you’re saying it’s a particular kind of failure. Maybe like someone says that the keyboard went out on their computer, and then you come to find out that no, it was the hard drive that crashed, and the person says that lots of people say the keyboard went out whenever their computer breaks, it’s just a figure of speech.
Are there any experts here who can confirm or deny this claim?
I’m a layman, but I know that “short” is short for “short circuit,” and that conjures up an image in my mind that doesn’t make sense when applied to other sorts of electrical problems.
I thought this was kind of funny, because the hard-drive is the usual catch-all generic term that the average clueless computer user uses to describe anything and everything in the case.
A short circuit has generally distinct symptoms (smoke being one of them). I would never say “that probably a short somewhere” unless the symptoms supported it. But, I might say that it was a possible short or open, if I could think of a scenario where either problem would fit.
I usually just say “It’s not supposed to do THAT.”
If I did not know what the problem was, I would use the generic term “fault”. I definitely wouldn’t use the term “short” unless I knew it was an actual short (i.e. electrical contacts touching that shouldn’t be touching).
I’m not surprised at all by a layman using the term “short” incorrectly, but it would seem very odd to me for any sort of electrical professional (electrician, engineer, or whatever) to use “short” in a generic sense.
How about if they were talking to a layman? One who obviously had no idea what a short was.
I find it absurd to have to defend the concept that not all people use all words properly or precisely, especially technical terms.
No, I don’t think any kind of electrical professional would use the term “short” when talking to a layman unless he thought it was an actual short. There are people who use “short” to indicate any malfunction (my wife is one), but I think most all of us see this as wrong usage and not just casual usage.
A short is a specific type of fault, so even if you are being a bit slangy and are talking to a layman who doesn’t understand electricity, it would still seem to me to be an odd thing for someone to say.
If I were trying to explain it to someone, and I didn’t know what the problem was, I’d say it’s either a short or an open, and if they ask what that means I would say “either something broke somewhere and isn’t connecting like it should or something is touching something it shouldn’t.”
The problem I have with it is that “short” is a very specific term used to mean a very specific type of fault, and in my experience it isn’t used generically by anyone with any electrical knowledge. “Fault” is the generic term that you’d expect a layman to understand.
To use the example up thread, it would be like someone with computer knowledge saying there’s a problem with the “hard drive” even though it could be a motherboard problem or anything else inside the box, just because some folks call the entire computer box the “hard drive”. Anyone with technical knowledge wouldn’t use that specific of a term in a generic sense.
I don’t have a problem with technical folks using slangy terms. That doesn’t seem all that weird to me and I do it myself fairly often. I might say something like “the TDR is getting a reflection at 24 feet from the end of the RG-6 quad shield” to another engineer or a technician, but I would say “the wire’s broke” to a layman. I wouldn’t say “there’s a short in the wire”. If there’s a fault in the wire, I might even just say “it’s borked” to the technician and might only give details if he asked. It’s not the slanginess that’s the problem, it’s that “short” is too specific, even in slang.
maybe my post was too wordy, but I’m pretty sure your answer was in there & I’m positive i meet the professional qualification.
I’ll add that i would never refer to unknown electrical problem to anyone as being a short unless it sounded like one & then i would use the word ‘possible’ in front of it.
generically using the term short to define anything other than a short is something no professional would ever do.
generically using the term short is what the public does & seemingly always will. it’s not a bother. i don’t look down on them for the lack of knowing it’s a very specific term describing a specific type of fault. their lives typically wouldn’t be enriched in any way if they learned the specifics. there’s a fault, they had to call it something, it is what it is, no big deal.
No, it’s a burglary. At least where I’m at it is. Robbery and burglary are 2 different things but the terms are used interchangeably by people.