Wiring 220. I did it and I survived to tell you about it!!

Off-topic
1

Many of you know that I just bought an old house.

First on my list was to strip all the loose wall paper off and paint the tenatious stuff just to brighten the place up while it is being re modeled. That was done a few weeks ago.

Next on the list is rearranging the kitchen so that there is room for the refridgerator in it. This entails taking out a wooden bar and island, moving the dryer to a different room, and moving the stove’s 220 outlet about a meter.

Most of the work could be pursued without hesitation, but the wiring had me rather frightened.

First I attempted to access the wiring through the crawl space. I have never been in such a creepy dismal place before. It is not a crawl space. It is a drag-yourself-on-your-belly-through-a-labyrinthine-channel-along-the-fine-dry-dirt-littered-with-fiberglass,-broken-light-bulb-shells,-nails,-and-loose-wires-and-ductwork space. I brought a dynamo driven flashlight which only emits a dim blue beam. Then I nearly got stuck. Seems that isn’t the way to get there. I Werggled backwards the 40’ back out of the basement. I felt like a trapped miner, really. I coughed from the dust for … .well I am still coughing.

I took a break, had a BBQ and reflected on the situation. One sawzall and a couple elbow-diameter holes in the kitchen floor later, problem solved. The wiring is done! The stove works! I am alive to tell the story.

I did have the main power to the house turned off through all this, of course.

I feel like I have triumphed. The next and last 220 will be wiring the dryer in its new location. this will not involve the crawl space.

2

glad you didn’t find the last owner who wanted to move the stove!

3

I thought about things like that when I was down there. I completely spooked myself.

4

Wiring is pretty fun once you do it enough. My Dad and I built a 24’ x 24’ house as a second home at Sugarloaf (ski area). After helping him for a couple years, I ended up doing a lot of the wiring, probably about a quarter of the house, all the phone and cable. It was a fun experience and it gets easier and less terrifying the more you do it. You’ll learn a lot fixing up an old house, ours is a couple hundred years old, an ongoing 20+ year project… good luck, and remember, “it’s always something…” (our favorite working-on-a-house motto).

5

Electricity is for sissies.

6

Lucky you don’t live in the UK…doing that sort of work here would get you in trouble. They made much of house wiring ( kitchen/ bathroom/ new circuit installations) illegal for anyone not specifically certified to do it.

There are people with degrees in electrical engineering, who cannot wire in a new cooker, because the lack of a certain piece of paper renders it illegal for them to do so. Might make an interesting court case:
“Are you qualified to repair that bathroom light fitting?”
" No your honour: I have only been a chartered electrical engineer for 20 years"
" Guilty: I sentence you to the electric chair. I wonder if you might wire it up for us before you go?"

Its supposed to stop the unqualified bodger, but bodgers are probably so unqualified that they don’t even know they are not allowed to do it.

Nao

7

In the cellar of my house, ( also pretty old) is an area of new-ish brickwork some 2 feet by 3 feet in size. It is directly below one of the outside walls and has an airbrick fitted centrally into the new bricks. So this airbrick is some 5 or 6 feet below ground level. If I push a metal rod through one of the airbrick holes, it goes through for at least 3 feet without hitting anything at all. So below ground, immediately outside the wall of my house, under the pathway, is a hollow chamber of unknown dimensions, and the reason for its existance not known. I bought the house from a middle aged gay couple. Friends have speculated that one of them used to have a wife…

Nao

8

Way to go, Blake. Sometimes its scary how much you learn and how many skills you develop out of necessity. Before you know it, you’ll be sweating on plumbing fittings and hanging new gutters.

Our house isn’t that old comparatively, built 1962, but we’re only the second owners of the house and have determined that the previous owners were about the most mechanically inept people we’ve ever known. Once I lost voltage in the detached garage; the garage light was extremely dim. So I dug up the wire that runs from the garage to the house and found some very fun stuff. When the previous owners built the garage, they ran a wire through the house’s foundation wall and mated it with the wire running to the garage. Only their termination of the wires with each other consisted of twisting the leads together, wrapping them with electrical tape, throwing the mess in the ground and burying it. I had to redo the connection, then appropriately installed the termination in a ground box listed for burial and now the garage is happy again.

The other good one is from the new stove we put in. When I took out the old stove, I found that my previous owner friends had run the romex wire out of the recepticle box in the wall, inserted the ends of the wire leads through the little holes in the end of the stove’s plug’s spades, bent them over, wrapped the mess with electrical tape and threw it on the floor.

I’m almost afraid of what else of their work I’m going to find as my home projects proceed. I’ll let you know if we all burn to death in a house fire.

Bruce

9

220 (Actually, 240 by now) doesn’t actually kill you. In fact, voltage doesn’t kill you at all. It’s the current that does you in. I’ve been zapped 4 times by 220V now, and three times by 30kV (Yeah, what can I say, I just love superheated plasma :P). I’m still here to tell the tale.

10

Good going!

I too, was thinking about the

and gouges left embedded in the walls and floor by the previous owner as he was dragged deeper, scratching and clawing… :frowning:

The most I’ve been

with was about 600 volts, a capacitor tester at high school. It definitely knocked me off my stool! :astonished:

12

From GKMAC Quote/

Quote:
Originally Posted by Naomi
There are people with degrees in electrical engineering, who cannot wire in a new cooker.
/endquote

Quote GKMAC
Well actually they can, they’re just not allowed to do it.

/endquote
/endquote

…

Which means exactly the same as the words I had written, but your quoting just a part of my sentence allowed you to suggest I had a rather different meaning. I don’t mind being quoted, but you should not do so in such a way as to then be able to imply that my statement was wrong.

My full sentence was:

“There are people with degrees in electrical engineering, who cannot wire in a new cooker, because the lack of a certain piece of paper renders it illegal for them to do so.”
See how different the full sentence is?

Of course it may be that you were motivated by silly pedantry concerning my use of “cannot” rather than “may not”, in which case I am sorry, for English is not my first language and I do occasionally still misuse words.

Nao

…

Can’t visualise… Of course you can. Try it. It’s fun, especially if you add in some over the top extras: SWAT teams, helicopter gunships, an aircraft carrier arriving via the local canal, etc., all homing in on your front door.

I think the local council can certify the work if not done by a certificated person? Probably at greater cost than employing an electrician in the first place ;-).
I wonder whether this new housing information pack scheme, or even the survey, might now have an effect on this. It could be that a standard question might be "Has all the wiring since (“date of legislation and new wiring colours”) been done by a suitably certificated person? “Illegal” wiring, even if done by a highly competant, but uncertificated person might make selling a house more difficult?

I personally have little trust in tradesmen, certificated or not, and would usually prefer to do the work myself. The “gasman” called next door, and departed. The gas I later smelled in my house led to an open-ended gas supply pipe being found in the work he had “completed” , before turning the gas back on and going home. The entire house next door was filled with a heavy gas/air mixture. I was living next door to a bomb. Visualise that too!

Nao