January 13, 2012
Basic Home Wiring. A Comedy.
While Fu was away during the break, I thought it a good idea to replace all of our old light switches and power sockets with new ones. What we had were old, cracking, yellowed. They came with the house, some 30-odd years ago. I know it’s dangerous to do so, but I knew working “live” with rubber gloves would be the way I’d go. And I saw plenty of sparks and tripped the fuse box a number of times. I can vouch that I felt no shock and was safe, though not prudent, I’m sure. Things were going pretty well. I got the hang of how the newer sockets worked pretty quickly. Most of the time, I’d simply note the wire configuration for the older piece and copy it for the new. I was working working on the power plug for our downstairs bathroom when I accidentally connected the two hot wires and tripped the fuse box. I went upstairs and reset the fuse. Still no power in the bathroom. I assumed I must have wired it wrong. Still no result. I then thought that perhaps I should be using a 20-amp socket instead of a 15. After all, the wires were too heavy a gauge to use in the new plug anyway. I went to the garage area, thinking I’ll drive Fu’s car to Lowe’s. I keyed in the code and the garage wouldn’t open. I thought perhaps that I’d typed it in too quickly. Still no response. I went to my own car and used the garage opener. Nothing. Then it dawned on me that the garage is on the same circuit as my guest bathroom. I was screwed. In a panic, I called a coworker’s husband, who’s an electrician. At the time, I didn’t realize that I had the wrong number, so I left a long, rambling message on someone else’s phone.
As I waited for a phone call that was never going to come, I took my continuity tester to other rooms to see how they were wired and where I might have erred. When I got to the master bathroom on the second floor, I noticed that the GFCI socket’s fuse had been tripped. I hit the little red button, and suddenly I heard the bathroom fan downstairs roar to life. The garage door was also back to operation. Turns out that I had wired it correctly from the start, but my short circuit had tripped an entirely different fuse. Everything was working, and I had finally succeeded before Fu came back from Japan. Or so I thought.
A couple days after her return Fu said, “There’s something wrong with the hallway light. It won’t come on anymore.” I opened up both of the three way switches. Couldn’t find anything wrong. Not that I really understood what I was looking at anyway. I rewired it, and the lights worked again. Unless you turned it off at one end and tried to turn it on at the other. Clearly, I hadn’t wired it correctly. I scoured my home wiring book. Looked at scores of online tutorials and videos concerning how to wire three way switched. But I was still doing something wrong. I was at my wits’ end. Again. My mind was no longer able to process the logic of what wire when where. I decided that there were 4 different ways the wires could be set up per socket. There were two. Making for sixteen possibilities. My mind was too fried to logic out a wiring schematic but not so much I couldn’t do some math. So I wrote out all sixteen possibilities and decided to go at them one by one. Finally, I caught a break. The first configuration actually worked. Whew. I’m done now. A proper 220 volt line needs to be installed for my workshop. I’m hiring a professional for that one.
