House almost caught fire!!

[electronicstud]

Glocke, Glad to hear no harm done.  Dont beat yourself up on the bulb wattage issue. Your mistake added 30 watts. 0.25 amps through the circuit,(120v/30watt=) little extra heat maybe.  The insulation on the wire (being totaly melted off) tells me that the socket failed; for the wire insulation to be melted off indicates much more than a 0.25 amperage increase.  You had a short to ground situation in a socket.  I am a mere rookie with only 15 years under my belt but...your fixture failed. looks like the wire gauge should of been able to handle way more than the .9 amps you were pushing with the 105 watts at 120 volts. I may be out of my mind; if a fixture is rated at .7 amps and you push .9 amps (with 14 gauge wire) and it shoots out fire balls.....slow Short circuit if the breaker did not trip. (to get to the point).... It is not yout fault. The wire melted, that means wire heat not fixture heat which means over amperage which means short which means shorted socket.  my free opnion. good luck!

[edwin]

I am curious why the circuit breaker didn't trip if there was a short. When we bought our house in 2002, the first thing I did was hire an electrician to come check out the electrical and put in a separate circuit for my home studio. He took one look at our 1957 Federal Pacific breaker panel and said it had to go. In the 80s or 90s, he worked for the Underwriter's Laboratories (the ones that do the UL certification) and tested the Fed Pac boxes. Apparently in the 50s they had a sweetheart deal with the FHA and when the loans got made for developments like mine in Boulder, CO, Fed Pac boxes were spec'ed. Long story short, he took 25 feet of zipcord, shorted it out and attached the other end to a Fed Pac breaker, flipped on the power and watched it burn all the way back to the breaker. Apparently these breaker boxes have been responsible for burning down as many houses as they have left standing.  
 
Moral: If you've got a Fed Pac box, replace it now. They are certainly not up to Alembic standards! :-)

[electronicstud]

Oh yea, definatly check that breaker. I worked on aiplanes back in my Airforce days. Wires to some of the bulbs on the aircraft would get so hot that they would fail due to fixture heat.  When that happened it looked totaly different than socket/bulb failure.  When the fixture got too hot everything would bake semi-evenly from the outside in leaving residule plastic insulation baked into the wire.  Both leads to the bulb would be baked from the outside-in evenly, which never melted all of the insulation off because the wire wasn't too hot..  When a socket failed resulting in a drastic increase in wire temp (amperage) the single socket overheats melting the nearest non metalic material... plastic wire insulation from the inside out cleaning the wire.  Basicaly; when the fixture became an oven... the insulation was baked onto the wire.  When the socket was pulling way more amps then designed for.. the insulation melted off of the wire leaving it clean like glockes,  I think?  This is my unprovable theory.  rock on!