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.
Nice, it sounds like the ancient systems in Malguri!
As long as you don’t have a beast head on the wall talking to you
Will you need to worry about a permit for the new wiring? In our county, you technically need one for anything more elaborate than replacing a switch, or in extremis, replacing an overhead light with a ceiling fan/light. I consider myself the equivalent of at least an apprentice/journeyman in many home improvement areas, but the elaborate hoops one must hop through to do relatively simple repairs is making me second guess myself all over the place.
A homeowner can do pretty much as he wishes. When you call an electrician you have to get a city permit, which tacks another few tens onto the cost. Which is another reason you find jury-rigs. At least we ask what code is, then go and do it ourselves.
If the minimum is #14 wire, use #12! 😀 I tend to use the Scotty Principle, and pretty much increase the suggested factor by half again. It might mean everything is somewhat overengineered, but it also (hopefully) means nothing will catch fire, and a safety margin for later.
I always remember this advice from _The Complete Book of Pitfalls_ (Dereck Williamson):
White wires connect to white wires, and black wires connect to black wires. White wires connect to chrome terminals, and black wires connect to brass terminals. The key to electrical work is segregation: try to integrate, and it’s burn, baby, burn!
I’ve only replaced light switches myself, and I turned off the breaker first. Usually power failures here are external (like the transformer that blew out last summer).
Most of electrical work is common sense. Turn off the breaker for the circuit in question – even 110V can tickle/sting/hurt/kill pretty bad (depending how much of you and which parts it goes through). Get a good DIY book for tips and general knowledge, and then find a book about your area’s code requirements for the details. In my area, things like the incoming bare ground wire going around the screw in the box first, then connecting to all the other ground wires. That code book convinces them you at least tried to do it right. Yep, still need the permit and inspection, but from the utility people it wasn’t too bad. BTW, can you run your feed from the house to garage up in the air? It’s a bit ugly perhaps, but a whale of a lot easier and cheaper.
I’ve done a lot of basic electrical over the years…replaced more ceiling fans than most people see in their lifetimes!…but I’ve found some real curiosities in this place!
Today was…hmmm…
I think I going to turn this into a post over on my blog.
Jane, I see where CJ commented on “brittle wire” in the garage, which broke repeatedly… this smells like aluminum wire, which was in vogue for a while, there. If so, please apply a very jaundiced eye to that wiring–aluminum wire is no longer approved for mains voltage, for some of the very reasons Carolyn already stated. Copper, and copper only, if you please! Especially if you are going to pull a Tim Taylor and “rewire it!”
No,no, we’ve had aluminum wire in my Oklahoma house before Jane, unlamented aluminum wire, I’ll tell you…This was good thick copper, but the temperature in which she was working (barehanded) was near freezing.
I actually did most of the wiring when we remodeled this old barn into our house and everything works the way its supposed to! All the wiring was totally inadequate old fiber covered stuff and Hubby was too busy doing the macho stuff like screwing his hand to the wall while installing drywall. 🙂 Jane’s post (ok, I couldn’t figure out how to respond on HER blog!) makes it sound like someone tried to put a three way switch in then gave up or something. They’re definitely a major pain in the assets. I did put 4 or 5 in here, but I kept the book next to me the whole way. They require an extra wire, a special switch on each end with an extra screw, and unless you want to use a ton of extra wire, you DO wire white to black.
Something we ran into on breaker boxes: we found it was cheaper to get a new box and replace every breaker we had rather than replace one or two breakers in the old box. Go figure. Sounds like you’ve already figured out that if you plan to use your garage for anything, you’ll want more than a 20 amp service!
Yep, we totally sympathize. I’m ok with wiring. Jane understands multiple switches and chained-together circuits, so she’s ahead of me, and she does the complex stuff, though I need to get her to explain what’s going on in that switch: she’s a rancher’s daughter, and I’m a city kid. I know the basics of carpentry, plumbing, and wiring—and we’re about to learn tiling together.
So did the police arrest the occupants of the car? I’m dieing to know!
evilwezal, I looked on ‘Spotcrime’, and they haven’t shown it yet—the gal was allowed to get back in the car; the guy was gone over by two sets of officers; and we tried politely not to stand in our driveway and stare… but… I’m curious as all getout. We live 2 blocks in either direction from situations I swear the police let stand only because they are such great magnets: they don’t need to patrol, just park outside these two houses: there are multiple infractions every night: burglary, domestic complaint, usually nightly, at one house; at the other a far nastier pattern involving repeated suicides. Now—how you repeat a suicide, I’m not sure, but there’ve been at least 5, plus burglaries, just amazing. So when we see a car stopped, we’re pretty sure they’re going to or coming from one of those two residences. City living at its finest. It’s not a dangerous neighborhood: but we have neighbors that will report things—our neighbor called the police because we’d left our back door open on a cold day. We’d closed the inner door and didn’t know it was open, so we apologized all round and thanked our neighbor, but we wish he’d called us first!
I’m continuing to check ‘Stopcrime’ to see if it turns up.
Wise old electrician told me once that when working with circuits that carry enough current to do you harm, keep one hand in your pocket. That way if, for some reason, the circuit is energized (trust no one), any current stays in your hand, and doesn’t go through anything more important (heart being the right in between the two hands)…
That’s a scary thought. 😉
Shades of Ben Franklin and Thomas Alva.
Is the neighborhood that dangerous? Rather than fish, you need a vicious sounding dog.
Forget the dog: if they get past the fish, they meet *us*, and we’re two genteel ladies with a broadsword and a mace. What court in the land would blame lil ol’ us?
“Remember, ladies: always carry mace.” 😀
To stay with the fish – a moat and mutant ( therefore cold tolerant) piranhas!
electric eels. That’s it: we need a sign that says: caution, electric eels. Petty criminal types generally don’t pay close attention in biology class.
How about “hands-fed guard dog”?
Anyway, if you are looking for an expressive warn-off sign, maybe this will be an inspiration:
http://www.engrish.com/2008/07/i-always-wondered-where-the-grinch-lived/
Broken English spoken there.
Now if only all published native English speakers (or their editors) had a decent command of the English language! This may be just a coincidence, but this last week I’ve read books by three different authors who didn’t know that “prone” doesn’t mean “face up” and “supine” isn’t “face down”. I mean, if you’re not quite sure what a word means, either don’t use it or look it up in a dictionary. I wonder why the editors didn’t catch that. That kind of sloppiness just annoys me.
“…if you’re not quite sure what a word means, either don’t use it or look it up in a dictionary.”
But MikeMike, they ARE sure. They’re just wrong 😉
One of my pet peeves, which fantasy authors really OUGHT to know, but don’t, is the difference between a dragon’s ‘hoard’ and Genghis Khan’s ‘horde’. (Of course there is a third homonym in that set, the verb beginning with ‘wh’, but somehow they don’t seem to get that one wrong.)
lol!
and prone and supine are two of my pet peeves, too. Lying there prone, staring at the sky…
I got a foreign manager who thought English manuals could be done by him to reconsider by mentioning slough/slew, slough/sluff, slough/–um, slough; and although, bough, bought, cough, dough, drought, fought, hiccough, lough, rough, slough, though, thorough, thought–and I think I missed some.
Like prone and supine: opaque, translucent, transparent.
My phonetics textbook says there’s eight different ways to pronounce -ough in the English language, and you got most of them there. You missed brougham, though.
Or was that eight different ways a word-final ‘s’ affects grammar? … I should look this stuff up.
Pet peeves: flammable/inflammable, regardless/irregardless, there/their/they’re, wether/whether/weather.
I like all of those, but perhaps my standards are set too low. I just want to eliminate the whole loose/lose confusion that seems to be everywhere.
…well, that and affect/effect and insure/ensure….
WAY OFF TOPIC!
I checked Amazon this morning and found a cover painting for DESTROYER!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0756406544/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0WVV3Y5F01ZYNZGC657D&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846
You have to be careful in older houses with the power. I have found some with the wires run off the back of the meter with no shut off!!!!