Tenant fried my grage panel

[Mark Forest]

My tenant called me a month ago to complain that he has burned up three TVs and he thought the electrical in the house was faulty. I tested the outlet and it was around 119 to 120. I put in a new outlet and told him to use a good surge protector.

He called me again the other day and said the garage lights were glowing bright and blowing out, and the garage door opener did not work. We called an electrician and we soon found that the tenant had wired and installed a compressor in the garage without my permission. The electrician said the compressor “fatigued the system” of the entire house. The compressor was wired directly into the garage box instead of a plug and had other code violations. Now I have to get a new main panel and garage panels.

Their lease is coming up for renewal and I will be billing them for part of this and I am wondering if I should ask them to leave. 

[Steve Babiak]

Your garage panel is probably a sub-panel that is taken from the main panel. Inside the main panel, there should be a breaker that limits the load that is delivered to that sub-panel. If there is no such breaker, then that is a problem. That breaker should trip if you overload the garage circuits, so maybe that breaker has too high of a trip level or maybe it is defective. 

Can you post photos of the insides of these "fatigued" panels?  Again, since the breaker did not trip, the load had to be within acceptable levels or there is a defective breaker.