Whatcha doin????

Like when the dentist says, "um, ok, rinse."

 

Kind of, except that you have to walk across a dark room navigating an unseen obstacle course to figure where the glass of rinsing solution is, and not being entirely sure whether there are any other glasses nearby and what might be in them.

 

So it looks like my understanding of how GFCIs work is correct and my friend is wrong. I wired the two of them side by side, sharing a neutral, and the two of them worked fine. When I wired additional outlets to the load side of the GFCIs they also worked fine as far as my socket tester was concerned. But as soon as I plugged in a simple battery charger (no battery attached) it popped the GFCI.

The upshot of this is that I'm going to have to rework it using two pieces of 12/2 rather than one piece of 12/3. It's tedious because it means twice as many neutral wires in the box and twice as many ground wires. That means two wire nuts to keep all the grounds connected - trying to get seven 12ga wires into a single nut isn't happening, so I'll end up with one nut connecting ground in, ground out and ground terminal, and another doing the same but also connected to ground the metal box.

I'm not yet sure what I'm going to do with 250 feet of 12/3 that is no longer useful, but which is opened and partly used so I can't return it. I guess it can provide something else for me to trip over in the dark....

 

I'm lazy.

Getting a new LP gas range/oven, so instead of wiring in a new 110v plug, I'm buying a step down adapter than takes the old 3 prong (I did say "old") 240v electric range plug and steps it down to 3 prong 110v plug for the electronics on the new gas range.

 

Had to read carefully.

I number of "220v adapters" and nothing more than the big 3 or 4 bladed 220v outlets converted to a "standard" 2 blade and 1 prong outlet that LOOKS like a standard grounded 110 outlet, but it actually is still carrying 240!

So, I made sure it was a true step down, and also have a built in circuit breaker. Don't want to burn the house down...

 

yep.

Oh, and the gas company wanted to charge me $150 to change out the spring valve on the gas regulator and the burner orifices for the burners and oven.

Socket wrench and 10 minutes, I think it should be. And that will include stopping for a cup of coffee.

 

That sort of thing is always fun. Looking at converters between UK, EU and US plugs most of them merely convert the physical characteristics without changing the voltage. It's useful given consumer electronics typically works with anything from 100-240v but I can imagine a few surprises if people used something that needed a specific voltage.

You really have no sense of adventure

 

Nit with ee-leg-tricity , no sir

 

Speaking of ee-leg-trickery I got a bunch more cables run across my basement. Since I can't get away with a single piece of 12/3 I'm going through my 12/2 at quite a rate, given I need two lengths of it between every pair of outlets. I had hoped to actually wire up some outlets but went to my secret stash of all things electrical to find I had one left, and I need at least 8. Since that line of progress was cruelly thwarted until I can get to the hardware store in the morning I took the time to run some cables ready to join them on to outlets when I can lay my hands on some.

The rate I'm going I may end up needing another roll of 12/2 before long. I like to have two rolls on hand, simply because that lets me connect a roll to a project if I need time to decide where the far end will be, rather than having to keep reopening things. It's a temporary measure but a few tabs of electrical tape over the exposed metal at the far end of the reel keeps it safe, since it's just my wife and I and she knows not to touch things like reels of cable with tape on the ends.

When I bought my last roll I had one partly used roll and one mostly used roll. The mostly used roll is now entirely used and the partly used one is disappearing at quite a rate. Maybe it's time I started using the new roll, so I still have two partly used rolls, rather than using all of one and then needing to buy another. I'm not sure if I'll need another entire roll to finish wiring the house, although it's entirely possible.

 

Is there anything better than tape?

 

You can put wire nuts on the end if you really want to, but for my purposes the desired benefit is to make sure I don't have exposed live ends that might be accidentally touched. An optimum solution would involve not having live ends at all, exposed or otherwise, but that makes more work when the next stage of the project happens and, since it's just my wife and I in the house, it's easier to leave the exposed ends rather than having to keep opening up electrical boxes. On the very rare occasions we show someone else into an area with unfinished electrical work we make sure they know not to touch exposed wiring, although I'd imagine any remotely competent adult wouldn't touch wire anyway.

The only time I've had exposed electrical wire in the main living spaces was a very short term matter while I waited for some new supplies and while it was exposed we declined requests for visits from friends with children, simply because the combination of exposed wire and children seemed liked it was higher on the "what could possibly go wrong?" scale than we wanted to play.

 

Yes. That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

 

My dad was an electrician and I sometimes helped him on some jobs. It was remarkable how often I'd get electrocuted working with him.
"Ted, go work on that outlet. I'll just go work on the breaker box and flip through them."
"Let's pull this live wire out from a drop ceiling. No, don't worry about that aluminum ladder you're on." Huge flash.
"Dad, why does it feel like my arm is getting sliced open?" "Oh, must not have grounded that one quite right."

(minor hyperbole)

 

Curiously I've never done myself any major harm with electrics. My first attempt to wire two GFCIs to a two-pole breaker was interesting, when the main house breaker blew. Today I got a pop and the breaker flipped, and it turned out that for the first time ever I'd pinched a cable too tightly with the cable clamps on a junction box. The clue was a darkened section of cable as it entered the box, so I backed off the clamp and noticed the tiniest spot of metal showing. I've never done that before, but that's fixed.

Now I've got five pairs of outlets around my workshop, color coded so I know all the white ones are on one circuit and all the brown ones are on another circuit. I was going to leave wire attached to the last point but since I haven't decided where the next point is going to be I didn't feel like leaving huge coils of live wire lying around, so just closed it all up. It's not such a big deal to open it up when I'm ready to put the next sockets onto the circuit.

 

People are usually shocked when they find out how bad I am with electrics

 

Major cleanup in the workshop area today. I got my second shop vac down there so I could suck up all the crud without filling my 55 gallon barrel with it, and sucked up a rather nasty mixture of sawdust, brick dust and a few random things like gnawed nut kernels left behind by the most recent rodent occupants of the basement. Then I got some more wood cut to make more of the rustic crosses I sell at the local market and some more wood studs that I plan to use to make some shelves. I won't install them yet because I need to drill a hole through the ceiling over where they are going to run a cable through the ceiling into the wall cavity above it.

It's good to have made some good progress - it's been a while since I really felt motivated to do much down there. My nice new circuit is working well.