Electrical Foolishness

[docrowan]

I'm the general handyman among my in-laws and kind of like doing electrical work. I try to be very safe, double-checking everything and following code.

We moved my grandmother-in-law into a new home two weekends ago and her son had removed a chandelier that people kept banging their heads on as they brought furniture in. (I managed to miss the actual move, darn it.) I had the happy task of reinstalling the chandelier the next day.

So for the list of foolish actions.

My wife told me that Johnny had just turned the light switch off at the wall to cut power to the chandelier (foolish #1), but that I had taught her enough about electricity that she went and killed the circuit breaker, based on the labels in the main (foolish #2). I was in a hurry (foolish #3) and couldn't find my circuit tester (foolish #4), so I took her word for it (foolish #5). I had a young man from our church helping me by holding the chandelier while I made the connections. Sparks flew shortly after as the hot arced on the neutral.

Of course it was a 3 way switch and somebody had flipped the opposite one. Johnny was lucky someone didn't do this when he was taking it down. The breaker label wasn't clear, so Deb had turned off the wrong one. I thank God I wasn't hurt, but I especially thank Him that the young man helping me wasn't hurt. Okay, now for Foolish #6: I thought twice about it before I did it, and still went ahead anyway.

Hope this will encourage someone else to think three times before short cutting while working with electricity. Anybody see any foolishness that I missed?

[siliconbauhaus]

I'm glad no one was hurt mate. The only thing I can think of was were there not more than the usual number of wires coming out of the light fitting ?

[footprintsinconc]

well interesting enough, something similar happened to me, but not with electricity.

i was in the garage attic trying to wire up for the new compressor i just bought a couple of weeks ago. through out the process i was trying to hurry up and tried to do things swiftly. of the many things that went wrong, the most foolish thing happened when i was backing out of the corner of the attic with the drill machine that had the spade bit on it. while i was backing out, i had the drill machine next to me with the bit pointed back, so i thought maybe i should point it forward so i dont poke my legs, so i turned it forward while moving back. then i thought, maybe i should keep the drill machine in front of me so i dont poke my arm. well guess what happened. while supported only on my hands and feet (stradling the roof joints, only had 2ft of room) i moved my arm back to grab the drill machine and i hid my arm full force into the spade bit and bleed for a while even with continuous pressure.

so the lesson i learned:
a- dont hurry (haste makes waste!)
b- be patient
c- if too many things are going wrong, just stop and take a big break and think things out!

hopefully, i remember this lesson next time when i need it.

regards,

[docrowan]

Not that I noticed. It's late and I'm kind of tired so I can't remember how a three way is wired, but would you see extra wires with a three way switch?

In any case, they would have been shoved up in the electrical box and only the wires originally connected to the chandelier were hanging loose. Fortunately Johnny had capped both the hot and neutral with a wire nut.

[TheRic]

There COULD be extra wires at the light on a three way. Depends on how the wires are run.

I had a Chandelier that kept giving us trouble when we moved in. I graped a ziptie, tied it up as high as it would go, problem solved.

My dad had a electrical business I helped wire many houses & business. I remember one time I was hooking up a receptacle.
Looked over at dad, said "Is this circuit off?"
He says "Yes".
Started to go back to the receptacle, stopped, looked at him and said "Are you sure?!"
He says "YES".
Started working on the receptacle. Boom power hits ground.
Dad with half smile on his face says "It's off now."
Started working on it again, BOOM did it again for some reason the first short didn't kick off the breaker. I got my wits back, I got up went to the panel box and pulled the circuit breaker out of the panel box! Came back into the room looked him in the face and said "It is now!"

[crokett]

More electrical foolishness. Several years ago we ripped out the floor in my parents' living room so we could dig the crawl space out. It is 1860s farm house and had only about 14" clearance. We were pulling the joists too. I had to pry a staple loose from a joist that was holding the feed for the A/C. My brother said he'd turned off the breaker. I knew I shouldn't be using a screwdriver but the pliers were in the tool room so... screwdriver slips, there is a flash, some scorched wood and I learned that 220V will take about 1/4" off the tip of a flathead screwdriver.

[jackellis]

I was replacing a light fixture in a rental we own last winter. Breakers turned out to be but there was only one switch in this particular room. After putting it all together I had my wife go outside to reset the breaker. As she walked out the door, I flipped the light switch on and there was light. A few expletives later I realized I should have turned off the whole house rather than risk a shock.

I've never been bit doing the small wiring jobs I can tackle myself but I'm usually pretty careful to make sure the correct breakers are turned off.

[Tequila]

Last summer I was upgrading some outlets in my mom's kitchen to GFCI. I used the circuit tracer back to the breaker box, flipped the breaker and verified that there wasn't any power on the outlet. Imagine my surprise when I got a shock as I started to remove the hot wire from the second outlet in the junction box. Turns out there was a second circuit feeding the other outlet.

Ever since then I use a non-contact tester before I touch a wire, even if I'm sure that I've got the right breaker.

[LinuxRandal]

Always make sure to check your wires after hitting the breakers. I know of several instances where there have been multiple circuits running through the same box (whose the moron that wired those).

Growing up, I thought that was a normal way to get a new watch, after watching my father, every time mom wanted a ceiling fan in a different room of the house.

[Ed62]

I learned to never trust a wiring job by someone else. We bought a fixer-upper, and found that some guy had a light running to 2 different breakers.

Ed

[Tundra_Man]

I learned to never trust a wiring job by someone else. We bought a fixer-upper, and found that some guy had a light running to 2 different breakers.

Ed

When I had my A/C replaced two summers ago, the electrician found a similar thing in my house: two breakers were feeding out to a break-out box. Explains why there were a couple of outlets in the house that I couldn't determine their breaker by going through and flipping each one off, then back on when it didn't cut the power.

[Rob3100]

In my late teens I was replacing the fixture in my room at my parents house with one that was much more "cool". After getting it installed I flipped the breaker and went back crawled up the ladder and not having a bulb handy, I did the "logical" thing...I stuck my finger into the socket and touched the base.

-rob

[RichG]

Reminds me of an electrifying experience I once had... About 25 years ago I was replacing a broken dryer outlet. I switched off the breaker labeled "Dryer", took the broken outlet cover off, loosened the lugs for the wires, then grabbed both of the two outside wires (the hots...) one in each hand. MAN WAS THAT EXCITING!

It turned out the dryer and the range breakers were mislabeled. I've never touched a wire since without testing first...

[Hellrazor]

I learned to never trust a wiring job by someone else. We bought a fixer-upper, and found that some guy had a light running to 2 different breakers.

Ed

Redundant power supply!

Electrical fun is defined as:

1. Doing wiring when you can not turn the power off and have to do it hot.
2. Working in an industrial panel where 1 breaker has a higher amp rating then your house.
3. Having a twist lock plug fall off a wire being fed by a 208v 60A breaker. Not sure why I decided to turn the breaker off before I unplugged it. But I was glad I did.
4. Backfeeding on a neutral... Its such a joy when people use a common neutral.
5. Feeding wire into a hot main feeder panel that has around 2000A per leg.
6. Old style analog meter without a fuse, switched to Ohms and try to check voltage on a hot 220 line. Now that is funny to see..
7. Morons who use stranded thhn for outlets...
8. Kids who stick a paper clip into an outlet with a metal outlet cover and touch the cover. A red glowing paperclip spinning on the floor, black fingers and a kid who didn't do anything............

[LCHIEN]

My son, then about 2 or 3, was pretty good at the round block-round hole, square block-square hole kind of shape matching toys.
One day he put a remote control into a VCR.
Another day he found a pair of tweezers. What do they look like?
Well, they fit perfectly into the electrical outlet. MY wife found him sitting there some what surprized next to a smoking, black outlet. She picked up the tweezers from the floor and burned her hand. Didn't seem to hurt him any, though.

Yes, we did have the outlet covers on outlets at the time. Seems like someone used it for the vacuum cleaner and didn't replace it...