Friday - May 09, 2008

… and sometimes the bear eats you

I just spent an hour and forty five minutes doing one of those handyman jobs for one of my little old ladies. Ten bucks. It started out really simple.

“Drew, can you fix my ceiling fan? It isn’t working.”

She only lives a block or two away, so I buzzed right over.

“The fan works fine, Mrs. G., but you need a new wall switch. I can put one in for you.”

So I get her a switch - less than a buck, right? And go back and stick it in. Wall plate, switch screws, two wires. Done in 5 minutes. Easy, if small, money. Flip the switch, the light comes on. Ta da.

“Oooh, that’s not how it was. I used to flip the switch and the fan AND the light would come on.”

“Really? Let me take a look.”

And thus time began to unravel. While I’m pretty good at household wiring, having installed many circuits, breakers, and even mastered the tricky “traveller” required for a 3-way switch, this was one of those situations. Wiring installed by dead husbands ages ago. Well, they weren’t dead when they did the installation, but you’d be hard put to prove that to me. Old hubby had put two ceiling fans in the guest bedroom ceiling. Both fans also have lights. So in theory there should be two sets of wires to each fan, and up to 4 seperate wall switches. Nope. I had a bit of Romex coming into the junction box with two black wires coming out of it. HUH? And a much newer bit of Romex coming into the other side of the box with one black and one white wire. No green ground wires anywhere. The white wire was screwed to the boxes ground. The old switch that I replaced had one wire from the double black Romex to the hot end of the switch, and the wire from the cold end of the switch was jumpered over to the hot side of the second fan’s switch, which also had the second wire from the double black Romex on the same hot end. The cold end of the second switch went to the black wire from the black/white Romex. There’s a very old non-PC expression for this kind of dingbattery. It’s called a ****-rig. “A mare’s nest” is a much nicer way of putting it.

With the new switch in and the power back on, the first fan was on all the time, and the wall switch turned the light on and off. Which is exactly how it was wired in the past. Flipping on the second switch turned on the second unit’s fan and light at the same time. Naturally old Mrs. G., bless her, remembered things working the other way around, although twice she wasn’t sure, and once she called me Tom. Old old ladies ... not always quite there sometimes.

So I messed about with the switches, got to use my little Radio Shack electric meter and finally figured things out. I proved my thesis to her by removing BOTH switches entirely, then turning on the power. At which point the first unit’s fan came on.

The husband had wired the first unit’s fan directly into the power lines so that it was always on. Then he doubled the hot line and sent that down to the first switch. He must have tapped that unit’s ground for the light into the ground for the fan, somewhere up in the attic. So all the first switch could do was turn the light on and off. For the second unit he joined the fan wires and the light wires together at the unit, and just ran one pair of wires, one hot and one cold, down to the switch. So all the second switch was doing was turning the hot wire on. But the real fun was that he grounded the return line of the second unit to the junction box, FORCING the Romex sheathing to carry the return AC as a ground back to some other point in the house’s wiring where something was wired correctly that could pick up the ground.

Don’t take shortcuts with wiring folks. Black is red, white is white, and green is ground. White is not ground, though it actually mostly is with 110 volt house power. But you’re supposed to ignore that. Like the old McDonald’s burger jingle, you keep the hot side hot and the cold side cold. White joins to white, black/red runs the switches - in from the bottom and out through the top. And if you have a ground wire it’s always green and always is screwed to the junction box AND back into the green wire in the Romex. But this house is 100+ years old, and if it even has 3 wire Romex in the walls is a mystery to me.

So after I explained to her for about the 18th time that the first switch would only turn on the light on the first ceiling fan, I tied a bit of string to that unit’s pullcord for the fan so the old biddy could reach up and turn it on and off. She’s happy, and my fast bit of cash turned out to be less than minimum wage for the time spent. Oh, and they have 9 or 10 cats. It’s a cold rainy day here, so I was wearing my red fleece jacket. Which I took off and put down when I was working all that time. Big Mistake. It’s now a white and gray fur coat. Good thing I’ve got the vacuum cleaner handy, as now it’s time to go play Molly Maid down at the doctor’s office. Hey, at least he pays me. If I remind him enough.

Next week I get to stain somebody’s deck! Whoo hoo!! 

Posted by Drew458     on 05/09/2008 at 04:04 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
• Comments (6) • Trackbacks (0) • Permalink •  

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