Friday, June 24, 2011

Electricity, how hard can it be?

Seriously, there's a hot and a cold and ground, just like water only it's best not to let them mix... Right? Simple right?

Sigh, our contractor installed our dishwasher the other day (in spite of me telling him, and the electrician telling him not to) and when I went to turn it on, nothing. Nw behind the dishwasher there was a box with a 120v and 240v feed, so my immediate thought was, he connected it to the 240v and I need a new dishwasher, or should I say ANOTHER new dishwasher...

Max to the rescue (he's the electrician and a really great one) turns out the garbage disposal switch next to the sink not only Turns on the dishwasher (what?) but also two lights over the sink. Max sets about re-wiring that and notices some serious no nos... My contractor, is clearly not a licensed electrician as he used the wrong gauge wire (smaller number = larger wire, weird but true. Using the larger number wire means that you could melt the wire as it heats up trying to carry enough current for you. Melty wire usually means fire...) he also connected the ground to the dishwasher, but not to the ground in the wall completely defeating the purpose of the ground wire. Last but not least, he didn't use a clamp around the wire, so here is something that is perpetually filled with water, that is ungrounded, and with a wire that is rubbing on metal all the time... Basically a recipe for eventually electricuting yourself...

While max fixes that, which incidentally took him 6 hours due to the sheer volume of wires in the box, the electricity is off of course... Now the major issue with this house was water damage if you remember... When the elec is off, water starts dripping down the kitchen wall from the pump in the attic that is supposed to take the run off from the ac unit and bring it outside. More on the ac next post... Back to fun with electricity for now...

Finally all is said and done and Max and his father in law leave. Everything goes well for a little while until Gavyn goes to sleep. He has a ceiling fan in his room, and a personal fan (which secretly I think he needs for the white noise not the cooling effect as he sleeps under his comforter all the time) and the lights go out on the bedroom side of the top floor. I mean all of them, his room, the hallway, the master bedroom, the master bathroom.... All of them. So down to the breaker box, sure enough the fuse popped so turn it on and go turn some lights off to reduce the load.

Anyone who knows anything about electricity knows that by code you should only have between 10-12 things on a single breaker. One pot light counting as one thing, and one plug counting as one thing, we're approaching 40 things on that one breaker. Short of re-wiring the house not much I can do but change to cfl lightbulbs and try and keep most of the lights off all the time...

Finally, things have calmed down and I go to work (yes, all of the above happened on one day...) and my contractor comes over to install two new back doors on the house. The olds ones are so bad they don't even open anymore, but for $1000 I get two new doors installed and they look pretty good too... Before they get installed however the lights dim again, and then go out. The phones are down (wireless hand sets don't work well in a power failure) the Internet is down, and Jen has no cell phone so she cant reach me. She somehow finds my mifi and gets online long enough to email me so I give Max a call and he heads over right away.

Meanwhile, the neighbor comes over and asks if we are having electrical problems. That's right, we did something and the ENTIRE block is paying for it. I'm still not sure how that happens, that's what panels in your house are for, to isolate you from the outside world, but anyways the transformer on the street has lost a phase, so we can only get 120v into the house which is then split for all of the plugs, lights, etc in the house.. Pseg to the rescue and we are back to normal... The guy driving the truck says this happens all the time to this house... So we're in for some more interesting things I'm sure.

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