she’s working on her story—or trying to.
We go out to the car (detached garage) to go to Home Depot and pick up our lights for the basement (we’re installing daylight white fluorescent in place of yellow nastiness of 2-bulb incandescents.)
No power to the garage door.
Or to the lights.
We get out to look around, run in to throw the house breaker for the garage.
No joy. The breaker is loose. We conclude: must be the breaker.
We go to Lowe’s where we know we have senior people to ask about installing a breaker. Our alternative is 300.00 for an electrician, and we’re being fiscally conservative.
We find better lights and cheaper at Lowe’s, then are told ‘brand of breaker matters’.
We go home, extract old breaker, Jane runs to Ace (closer) and gets a single-switch 20 amp breaker.
We install it. Still no joy.
I go back to Lowes with the old breaker. Get a new new breaker.
No joy. I have also learned city code says there should be a breaker in the garage. Our garage is walled .in junk, a real mess. So…..I search where I can along the visible wiring. I find a hoe has fallen onto a transformer plugged into the circuit. I fix the situation, still no joy. I report this to Jane.
Meanwhile we have no power, and we have a mess. We have the garage door up for light in there, and just outside, at the end of our drive, two police cars have stopped a car and they have the occupants undergoing questioning while we’re trying to fix things. Jane has located the garage ‘breaker’, which consists of an ordinary lightswitch, meaning the power has an on-off but no short protection.
We now fear the line to the garage has broken somewhere under the koi pond. We can fix it, but this entails rearranging our breaker box, running a new line out to the garage, etc, which, by code, has to be buried 18″ deep in what amounts to rock.
Meanwhile a neighbor has come over, and he knows electricity and circuits, so we borrow a tester from him and discover the light switch, under its cover, is not wired right. So we’re working with that, the police are still at it, and at this point, we notice in the dim depths of the garage, there is a red light. This is on the battery charger. We start following that power down the line and find—yes, that plugin the transformer is in. It turns out that is glowing too: I didn’t know it was a GFI (groundfault interrupt) —and all the power passes through that circuit on its way to the light switches. Ha! Reset the button, the GFI switches back on, and we have power. It’s still not wired right: Jane spent the next while with very brittle cold wire, freezing her fingers off, and having the wire break repeatedly, rewiring that triple switch in the right sequence—
We’re still thinking of running a new line and installing a breaker box in the garage, which we now (after this learning curve) know how to do…we’d vowed never to work with direct house wiring—but y’know, it would have been a way lot more than 300.00 by the time an electrician figured this mess out, and now we are confident replacing breakers and even installing a breaker box, and we *have* worked with house wire without electrocuting ourselves, so we’re feeling at least triumphant and at least 300.00 richer.
Ow!—and welcome in, onewire!
Friend of mine found one where they’d used a piece of coathanger as a splice where they’d run out of wire…
Our latest adventure is going to be rewiring some t-4 halogen wall 150 watt sconces we got ages ago (t-4 bulbs rarely exist as under 500 w now) as t-3 j-type halogen 100 watt. We found the 3 1/8″ replacement ceramic sockets at Harrington supply online. Will refurbish some pretty spiff outdated art deco style glass sconces into a modern bulb-readily-available type halogen.
I’m not fond of halogens because of the heat and fire hazard, but where these are located, they’re not ever likely to catch a blowing drape or have anything land in them.
They look as if they belong on the old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon set, and we’ve always loved them but found no place to use them. Now we think we’ve got it, and we find to our delight we can refurbish them—odd since they’ve never been used, but bulbs have changed a lot since the 1990’s, when these were made.
re halogens: We’ve had one explode and send burning fragments 5 ft from the lamp. It caused little fires on the carpet and the sofa. Quite nasty!
I seen something on the news about your old state Olklahoma the temps got down to 31 below. That is quite cold for there even with the wind chill factor!!!!
31 BELOW windchill is probably a record! Although winds there are pretty constant and fierce.
I’m neither an electrician nor metallurgist, but copper wire should definitely be ductile well below any temperature you’re likely to see. Any 12 guage wire (= 20A) that is prone to repeatedly snapping would have to be defective and/or brittle from repeatedly flexing or overheating. I favor the latter, caused by undersizing the wire or a poor connection at the terminal. Brittle wire is a very bad thing and a broken conductor can cause arcing across the break or from hot to neutral and/or resistance heating that will cause a fire. If it were me and the wiring was accessible, I’d replace any segment that was brittle anywhere along its length or showed signs of overheating. Even if it were clearly due to a poorly wired switch, I’d inspect all of the wiring for signs of overheating or excessive flexing due to inadequate securement. I’ll work on energized circuits on occasion, but I would never leave undersized or damaged wiring in place.
Thanks for that, Brennan. That switch was a mess, involving the previous owner’s decision to fracture the plastic to get a wire where it couldn’t otherwise get, and the switch involved fell apart when Jane pulled it out, just fractured. We’ll replace that bit! We had taken its brittleness as a function only of the cold. THanks!
Definitely agree with Brennan, copper wire should NOT fracture at any temperatures where one is willing to be out in it (had to forego the throwaway line about Frostbite Falls, ND, dang it). I personally would tend more toward work-hardening as the issue–metal fatigue, in other words.
I know about winds I live in Carlsbad New Mexico!!! Us and west Texas get plenty!!!
Sunset used to publish a basic wiring guide. The old knob & tube wiring in my 1916 Bungalow in California was fraying, so I hired one electrician after another to add outlets and lights to the kitchen. Their work failed inspection 3 times, so I bought the Sunset book, followed the instructions and got a pass from the inspector. Hired a different electrician for the bathroom – same problem: the work failed inspection. Finally decided to just re-wire the whole house myself … so I got a right angle drill, worked underneath the house in the crawl space (a previous owner had dug out underneath to a depth that could store wine barrels so I had more than 18″ to work in but it was on my back in the dirt) and then re-ran all the lines through the basement. Used 12 guage Romex and put new grounded and/or GFI outlets (as appropriate) everywhere…all my work passed on the first inspection because I was super careful and took my time. But all the new outlets required upgraded service and a new box – so I asked the inspector who he would have work on his house, and hired that electrician to hook up the wiring runs to the circuit breakers in the the new box and then to hook it up to the utility connection. However, 12 gauge Romex is very difficult to work with in the outlet/switch boxes –lately I’ve seen larger boxes in the supply store but those were not available when I did the work. The first growth douglas fir used to build the house was as hard as rock – so drilling wasn’t easy. And they put fire blocks at random heights in between the studs, so I never knew if the run would make it to an existing switch. The knobs prevented me from just pulling out the existing wiring or using it as fish. There were a few fun days working in the attic with a 5.5 foot long drill bit…but I succeeded in using all the existing switch boxes.
It’s been 15 years, and neither I nor any of my tenants have had any problems! So I encourage you to study up and do it yourself.
In our county, there’s no such thing as DIY, unless you never plan to leave or sell your house. All work must be done (theoretically) by licensed contractors. I’m inclined to take berylkit’s route and do the work myself, then pay a willing contractor $100 to sign off on it, if my work is adequate.
I suspect the same thing in the UK, since to sell a house you have to have info about who did what, almost like a warranty …