A strange fishy smell and then nearly a fire

[Globalti]

The fishy smell is amines given off by degrading plastic. As others have written, it's a familiar smell to people who had older brittle plastic light fittings in their homes and a hot pendant light fitting has often caused much head-scratching and sniffing around. Wiki is pretty good on overheating electrical fittings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_electronic_components

 

[Deleted member 26715]

Daughter rang me back end of last year, she'd lost all electricity, on investigation this was the main feed coming into the house

 

[Globalti]

This is a familiar picture to my British colleague who lives in Nigeria and whose house was built with Chinese electrical and plumbing parts. Almost every day I speak to him on Watsapp and the first moan is something like: "Ah... my gen got spoiled this morning." Substitute gen with AC, pool pump, borehole pump, inverter, electric gates and any number of switches, taps, valves and tanks.

And that's before you get onto the car and the second-hand parts the garage fits while charging you for new parts, or the new part they steal from your car and substitute with second-hand or "tukunbo" parts. It's the reason why he never allows employees to take their work vehicles home.

 

[subaqua]

People of a certain age would have known that whiff the minute they first got the smell.

Or people of a certain trade ...

 

[Sandra6]

A few years ago we had a power cut, nothing unusual we had a run of them. But everyone else's power seemed to have come back on but ours - bizarrely our upstairs flat was on a different "loop" to the bank below.
Middle of the afternoon we also noticed a fishy stink, but Wigton is known for it's very own unique pong so we didn't relate the two at first.
Anyway, after a whole day with no power I rang the electricity people and they were quite dismissive at first, but then I mentioned there was a strange smell and could it be related? "We'll have somebody there shortly"
Hour later, bloke turns up, takes a look at the wiring and the main wire that was bringing power to the property was slowly melting!!!
Got it sorted straight away, but if they'd left us overnight the whole place could well have gone up!

 

[Brains]

People of a certain age would have known that whiff the minute they first got the smell.

I've done up a few old houses, and looked at many many more.
When you inspect them it always amazes Estate Agents when inside the first 3 minutes both my wife and I tell them the issues they will find

Indoor Smells:

Fish = hot Bakelite/electrical issues
damp dog = rats
drying washing = drainage issues/collapsed drains
Musty = Dry Rot
Cat wee = Cat wee, you will need to replace the floorboards and possibly the joists as you can never get rid of it
Curry = blocked chimneys
Soot = broken chimneys
seaweed = Wet rot
Coal = gas issues