You make a good point about the 14ga spurs (am I right in thinking what you're calling a branch circuit is something that branches off the main circuit?) not being protected by a 20A breaker, I hadn't considered that aspect of it. What I'm looking at doing is running a 20A circuit to every room for the power outlets (with some rooms maybe having more than one circuit) and 15A circuits on each level for lights. I use LED lights so in theory I'd probably be safe using telephone cable to power them but that's not the sort of thing I'd want the inspector to see.... I was originally going to include lighting on the individual room circuits but find it's easier to work with if they are separate. If I need to work on the outlets I've got a light I can use, and if I need to work on the light I can plug a light into the outlets. Electrical work with nothing more than a light on my head isn't something I care for much.
Epi taken off coffee? I assume we're talking about our good friend episkopos. Maybe he has seen the light. Maybe he changed from his cult to IHOP, you never know....
I broke sme more of my house. Pulled down some more walls, more concrete, more plaster. Burned a pile of laths. Figured I can add a feather strip to my existing studs to make them just a little deeper (1/4" or so) and save myself the work of doing a full job with companion studs and trying to figure out how to fill the gaps. I just need them ever so slightly deeper in places to take the insulation panels. Maybe I can do the same in the room that's currently the study, it seems infinitely easier than using an angle grinder to cut the surface of the concrete back a fraction of an inch.
About one week ago I increased the font size on my PC since reading became harder and harder. Definitely an improvement and pleasant for the eyes. When I go back to the old (and normal) font size I can not read things any longer. Amazing how fast the brain adapts.
I Know what you mean PD. I can no longer buy regular sized font Bibles. I went from Giant to my latest being SUPER Giant.
Did a bit of enabling work today. I need to remove some baseboards, but that means disconnecting the power sockets in them, which means the room I'll be working in has no working sockets. Not only that but I'd have been limited to one working socket in the whole of the downstairs area I'm working in. So I rejigged the circuits a bit, put a socket in one room on the same circuit as the other socket in the same room (which once powered an air conditioner but doesn't need to be on its own circuit any more), and rerouted a cable so it can power a socket in a section I don't need to work. I'd previously disconnected it completely because it was powered by ugly knob-and-tube aluminum wiring. That piece of wire made the transition from being disconnected to being removed and tossed into my box of cables I've removed, and is now replaced by a nice new piece of 12-gauge. I also grew intensely tired of hitting my head on the pipes to the radiators. I'm seriously thinking the whole lot needs to come out and get replaced with PEX or similar. That way I can tuck the pipes between the overhead joists and not keep banging my head.
I have radiators now. In years gone by the house had a gravity fed system so there are lots of very fat pipes. Then it was changed to a pump-driven system but lots of the old pipe remains. Much of it is at head height. That gets a bit tedious.... What I'm wanting to do is get rid of the hotch potch of copper, cast iron and galvanized pipework and replace it with plastic, fed through the joists where possible and tucked out of the way otherwise. Anything other than metal at head height, sometimes hung from nails on rusty twisted wire.
There are a couple of bits I was going to use to run an air conditioning unit. Seriously.... removing all the knob and tube and all ungrounded cabling is on the agenda. It's essentially a rewire of most of the house. I've got some old 12ga cable that is strung diagonally across a room in my basement. I want to get that rerouted and tucked out of the way - at present it's pinned to the underside of the joists and I want to get to a place where I can put a ceiling in that room if I want. Along the way I'm replacing all the sockets that lack a ground and generally tidying up. When I started there were all sorts of curious aspects to the wiring, including nice 12ga cable with the ground bent back and wrapped around the sheathing, and the black and white cores attached to knob-and-tube with wire nuts in the open. No junction box, no nothing, just a nasty hatchet job. I suspect whoever did that just did enough work that it looked OK from one room, figuring my wife's aunt wouldn't look any further to check they actually did anything useful. All that remains of that circuit is a few tails left connected to sockets but cut off from anything live. Sooner or later they will all get reconnected with new cable. I've got a nice big box that I'm using to gather up the cable I'm taking out. When I'm done I'm going to give it to the guy who collects scrap metal for a local charity. I've also got a bucket I'm using to collect the scraps of metal that I generate when I cut a couple of inches off a piece of cable, if I cut loops off the end rather than trying to straighten them out, and the assorted screws etc from the elderly sockets that end up in the trash. I've also found a remarkable number of old nails stuck in joists that don't appear to do anything except present a risk I'll snag myself on them, so I've been pulling those out and throwing them in the bucket too. And then there are the nails from the trim I've been prying off - they go in there too. It's already getting quite heavy.
Hey Tom, you mentioned you were a Master Electrician so maybe you can help with a question. Since the neutral bar and ground bar are connected in the breaker panel, what purpose does it serve to have a third, grounding, cable running all over the house. Couldn't the same purpose be served by connecting the ground to the neutral at each socket? It would seem to need just a small length of cable at each socket rather than a third cable (costing more money and taking more space) running all over the house.