More Instructions For the Do-It-Yourself Electrician...

Under the house and above the ceiling, what fun!!!

Smoky Weiner                                                

    Usually an electrician has to go into attics in the summer and under the house in the winter or rainy season.  This is known as Weiner's Law. 

It's been a relatively cool summer so far, and it has not inflicted the usual misery of working while extremely hot.  This gives you the opportunity to save literally dozens of dollars repairing your own electrical system in the comfort of an attic that is probably no more than 110 degrees!  Don't miss this great opportunity!  There's nothing that improves your concentration than working around crumbly live wires with sweat dripping off every part of your body and running down your tools.

     Last time I wrote about the little explored real estate under your floorboards.  The Stephen King-like zone of fear that in your mind's eye, harbors venomous snakes and spiders, all very aggressive, and the Bugs Bunny-Fifty-Cartoon-Eyes-Looking-At-You-From-The-Dark critters you'd be sure to see if you were foolish enough to go down there.    This time I will talk about attics, floored and unfloored. 

     When you are an electrician in an attic, the first rule is this:  Do not insert any portion of your body through the ceiling below.  This is accomplished by treating every board you step on like a Vietnamese booby trap.  Cheap "pressboard" that has been absorbing Charleston humidity for fifty odd years made up the last attic floor I walked on.  I don't mean really walking, it was more like a fat, half-blind trapeze artist, grabbing supports and deftly dancing on imaginary 16" centers, worriedly searching for the nails which signify a supporting beam underneath.    

     The actual electrical work is very simple.  Find what you want to work.  Find a not too overloaded source of power and turn the breaker that feeds it off.   Inspect or place new wires from the not too overloaded source of power or the breaker box itself, to the outlet, light or device you want to work.  Carefully twist together the correct wires which are hopefully the right size and are hopefully connected to the right sized breaker and hopefully don't also go to the refrigerator outlet, and place wire nuts on them.  Send the children and your wife outside.  Try the breaker.  Bring your wife (or husband if he's a pantywaist and is letting you do it) back in and ask if she (or he) smells something like burning tires.

     Call your mother to take the children and then see if your work holds up overnight.  I would get up every two hours and feel the wall and take a good sniff too.  Then you can let the kids back in the next day and sleep tight in the future, knowing that you did the work yourself, and while you don't actually know if the work was done exactly right, you have at least seen it done.   And you saved dozens.

Different Ways to Curl Your Hair          

                                                           by Smoky Weiner

     Last week, a client actually told me she flipped the breaker for the twentieth time and was getting "a burning like smell".  She looked straight at me and asked what I thought that smell was.  I looked straight back at her and I said, "It's something burning".

Here's the way most people fix their electrical problems:  They flip the breaker every times it flips off.  After about twenty repeat flips, they call and say something like "I think the breaker is just broken, it keeps flipping off".  

     No.  The breaker is working.  When it flips off, that means it is working.  If it stays on and you smell something burning, then it may not be working.  Every time you flip that breaker without having the problem identified and fixed, you are heating up wires beyond their capacity, which is what flips the breaker.  At a certain point, the heat will melt the wires in half and the circuit will shut off.  That much heat sometimes causes the insulation and paper in the wire jacket and in the wall to ignite and that is how a house usually catches fire.  Paper, wood, air and excessive heat - there you have it and it happens all the time, ask any fireman.

     Do your bathroom lights go out when you click the button on your GFI outlet?  If wired correctly, that will not happen.  It's an easy fix, about fifteen minutes.  Do you even have a GFI outlet in the bath and kitchen?  I hope so.  Drying your hair next to a wet sink while standing on a damp towel can provide an inexpensive permanent if drop the hair dryer.  Especially if you ever have kids around, GFI protection is not a joke or just an option.  If you've ever been shocked, you may think it was bad or you may think it was not that bad.  That's not a mark of your toughness though, it is a mark of how well your body was grounded at the time.  For example, if you were dry and wearing sneakers and the floor was carpeted with a nice rubber pad underneath you may have experienced a mild shock.  If you just came in out of the rain or the shower or your bare foot was in a damp spot on the floor or your other hand was touching a  faucet you may have gotten slammed.  All from the same little circuit. 

      Many electricians will come to your house for free or maybe for a small fee if they have to drive a few miles and spend a bit of time checking things out.  It doesn't make sense to not have an electrician look at something.  At least you'll know what to turn off until you get the money to have it fixed.  You will probably find it was less expensive than you thought.  It will definitely be less painful than a fire.  

Do It Yourself Electric - Really? by Smoky Weiner #2

Do It Yourself Electric - Really?

by Smoky Weiner                                                                                                 7/22/13

Subterranean Homesick Electrician Blues

     I enjoy being under a house.  No one bothers you when you're down there.  It's a great way to get away from the old lady if she's bothering you to do some horrible task such as mowing a half acre of wet overgrown lawn.  In fact if you're really slick, get an old pair of pants and stuff them full of rags and tie a pair of work boots on the ends.  Go to the air conditioning unit on the outside of the house and next to it will usually be a hatch for crawling under the house.  Then put some old work lights under the house, take a long shovel or rake and push the pants by the crotch as far in as you can.  Put a radio under there and turn it up with music or news, whichever annoys your wife more.  Then, go to the bar and start planning the actual repair.  This will cover you for about two to three hours. 

     When I really have to go under a house I like to make it comfortable.  First, get some long extension cords, a power strip or 3 in 1 plug, two battery powered flashlights, one being the one that comes in the case with your battery drill.  I like to take a radio and turn on classical music which  causes the customer to think I'm smart .  Never bring food under a house.  If something does live under there, you don't want to waste time fighting over a sandwich.   Anyway, take a roll of thick plastic sheeting and put it under the house near the hatch, place the supplies, tools and lights in a cardboard box, put your coveralls on and your beanie hat.  If you are scared, put a pair of goggles on.  The goggles will help you by immediately fogging up so you won't be able to see more than three feet ahead of you.  Roll the plastic out in front of you as you crawl, pulling the box and lights with you as you go.  Avoid any bare or chewed wires, especially the larger diameter wires.  The bigger the wire, the more amperage it carries so you don't want your sweaty head coming into contact with it.  (See the movie, "The Green Mile").  Finally after a lot of grunting and groaning you will see where all the wires come together and go up into the breaker box.

     Now, you must crawl all the way out, pick up the stuff you forgot to take under there with you in the first place and return to your former position.  By this time you are filthy, you've cut yourself a couple of times and accidentally put your hand on a small unidentified pelt .  This is a kind of natural encouragement, you might call it God's way of helping you work faster.   The main thing is you'll want to pay attention to everything you see under there.  Go to the area of the problem and follow the wires.  You will learn things about your house you never realized, such as why all the bedroom, bathroom, garage outlets and outside lights go off  when your wife is using the hairdryer.  You may well see the work of a few of the prior homeowners and their brothers -in- law, all of whom claimed to be electricians.  Well, the Waffle house has cooks and fancy French restaurants also have cooks and you can probably cook some things yourself.  Don't cook your house.  Call an electrician.     

     Now one more word of encouragement; Don't be afraid to go under your house.  Almost every living thing under there will go the other way when it sees you coming.

Do It Yourself Electric?  Really?!!

                                                                                          by smoky weiner

      Recently, I got a call from a woman who said half the electricity in her house was out.  Half the lights, half the receptacles.  Upon arrival I looked at the panel (breaker box) and no breakers were tripped.  One by one, starting from the closest receptacle to the panel, I inserted my tester and discovered that both neutral and hot were hot and there was no ground so both lines were hot but not short circuiting.  In plain English, someone was about to fry.

     The woman said the breaker had tripped a couple of times before and she always switched it on and off and on again and it would work for a while.  I removed the wall plates to three receptacles that were on the circuit in question and they looked like ice cream cones on a hot day in Libya.  The wires were still hot. That is, the breaker was on, electricity flowed through both the black or "hot" wire, and also through the white or "neutral" wire.   This house had a lot of paper and wooden items in it, also known as "kindling".  I thought, "This house is in the exact state many houses are in the very moments before a blaze starts.  Literally, a fire waiting to happen.

     I shut off breakers until I found the one that killed power to the wires in question.  I opened up everything that was now off in order to find where the problem occurred.  Eventually I came to the conclusion that the problem was underneath the house where some cruel and inhumane person decided to put the air handler which is just a big fan that pushes heated or cooled air through the ducts.  Down goes I.

     I am a moderately priced electrician which is to say that I try to be less expensive than an orthodontist.  Never the less, no one wants to pay me for twisting a bunch of wires together when heck, you can just get in there with a pair of pliers and a tube of burn cream and do it yourself!  But getting under the house?  Now that's worth some dough!  The people can't pay me fast enough when there's something to do under there.  They look at you with big old eyes and say something like, "Whatever you have to do, whatever it costs, just do it..."  and  "Can I get you something to drink?"  I get in my coveralls and amass a roll of plastic, a few tools and a couple of lights but then so as not to disappoint the customer, I carry a big stick and a good sized knife of some kind.  If the customer is actually watching me crawl under the house, I put the knife between my teeth.

      Anyway, I followed the wires stapled underneath the house and saw one that went right through the duct insulation in one place and was actually supporting the duct in another place, putting a lot of pressure on the live wire against an old rusting staple that was eating into said wire.  Very nice.  I saw another wire which had been clamped into a metal box so tightly that the clamp ate through both wires and as the circuit and the box were not grounded, the white wires got hot and the breaker stayed on.  Nice.  Very nice.

Anyway, all fixed.  half the house, half the lights, the a/c.  New wires, four new receptacles and wall plates, new dedicated circuit to air handler, new GFI in the bath and fix the outdoor receptacles to boot.  While I'm checking things in a case like that I am fixing little things as I go.  Everything else was checked and looked at from the attic to under the house and inside the breaker box.  It was a few hundred bucks. 

     What's my point?  It's that she waited a long time before she called me.  Many people  do.  Nothing in electricity is magical.  Everything works or doesn't work for a perfectly good reason, none of which have to do with ghosts or sunspots or aliens or the cable guy.

An electrician is a sleuth, solving your puzzle, finding the problem beyond a doubt, which gives you confidence in the safety of your home, reduces stress and helps you get a good night's sleep.   What's that worth?