Fuse (electrical)
electrical safety device
In electronics and electrical engineering, a fuse is an electrical safety device that operates to provide overcurrent protection of an electrical circuit. Its essential component is a metal wire or strip that melts when too much current flows through it, thereby stopping or interrupting the current. It is a sacrificial device; once a fuse has operated, it is an open circuit, and must be replaced or rewired, depending on its type.
Fuses have been used as essential safety devices from the early days of electrical engineering. Today there are thousands of different fuse designs which have specific current and voltage ratings, breaking capacity, and response times, depending on the application. The time and current operating characteristics of fuses are chosen to provide adequate protection without needless interruption. Wiring regulations usually define a maximum fuse current rating for particular circuits. A fuse can be used to mitigate short circuits, overloading, mismatched loads, or device failure. When a damaged live wire makes contact with a metal case that is connected to ground, a short circuit will form and the fuse will melt.
A fuse is an automatic means of removing power from a faulty system, often abbreviated to ADS (automatic disconnection of supply).
“Fuse (electrical)” enters the record as electrical safety device. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fuse, electrical and safety can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q182221. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fuse (electrical)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.