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What are those equipments?
They look like a gas furnace and a hot water tank. My first thought was "Why are they connected? ", because I thought the tank had its own heating element. My second thought was "Aren't those water lines? How does a water line become incandescent?"
The only way that immediately springs to mind is so unlikely to happen. It requires multiple faults/mistakes.
1: The chassis of one of the two units became live (connected to "hot" for you Americans) but was also not grounded in any way.
2: The chassis of the other WAS grounded and created a circuit for the current to flow.
3: There was no RCD (GFCD or whatever you guys call it) on the circuit.In this way, that pipe would be the only thing connecting the two devices, and the resistance is causing a huge amount of heat (just like an incandescent bulb, or a heating element does by design).
Probably other possibilities, but it's just the first thing I could think of that could potentially produce this result. But, that's a lot of safety features to have either failed or just simply not been in place for this to be possible. So, frankly I hope I'm totally wrong.
Even if that happened, wouldn't the pipe handle a lot more current than normal house wires, or even the main ones connecting the building to the grid. I assume the pipe would be thick enough that the wires in your walls would be glowing long before the pipe itself was.
I would have thought so, but I think it depends on how thin the skin of the pipe is. I would also have expected a breaker to trip under that much load. But, based on that happening, I'd not be surprised if there are bypasses and/or broken breakers.
When we moved into the house we're in now, the RCD (GFCI) didn't work at all. I pressed test, nothing. Had the electrician over to change it. He tested the actual actuation using earth leakage. Nothing. So, faults can happen too.
I want to be wrong, though. Because that's a pretty bad state to get into, I think.
Both glowing portions are natural gas pipes. Perhaps it's somehow ignited inside the pipes and is super heating them but also somehow NOT travelling outside the two glowing sections and burning the house down???
I don't know, but I'd like to think I would shut everything off and run away until it demonstrably hadn't exploded rather than take a picture!
Maybe when it contains superheated steam?
Some part of me believes that water cannot get so hot that it would cause metal to Glow.
I would be happy to be proven wrong.
I mean, unless you're saying that the pipe is heating the water inside of it? Which at that temperature that water would be expanding to over a thousand times its size and would probably blow that line to smithereens.
Steam has no limit to how hot it can get. Until it eventually transitions into plasma of course. By then the oxygen and hydrogen would have separated, I imagine. Then it's no longer water.
Superheated steam was a problem in some steam locomotives, as running the water level too low would allow the boiler to reach temperatures that would compromise the integrity of the metal.
Only liquid water has the boiling point as a "limit".
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/715701/how-hot-can-steam-be
Apparently 3,000 C might be the limit, but idk.
I don't trust it entirely because it is a stack exchange website, there's not any hard evidence to back up the claim.
Yeah, don't know the specifics, but at some point the thermal energy will start knocking the molecules down into atoms.