21 Jul
2006
21 Jul
'06
3:42 p.m.
On Friday 21 July 2006 06:06 pm, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
Personally, I've never gone through an
appprenticeship (but have had some
direction, and have experience), and am a lot better electrician than most
of the ones in the are... It pisses me off immensely when I find somewhere
that the electrician reversed hot and neutral... the most annoying so far
was a lightswitch, where the idiot that built the place switched neutral
instead of hot. That made the simple act of changing a broken lightbulb a
dangerous proposition...
Only if you're grounded. :-)
I can beat that, though. When the family unit in the apartment downstairs
from us (Stepson, his wife, their six kids) complained
about getting shocks
from the dryer, I checked the cord wiring (it had been replaced), the wiring
at
the outlet, and finally the wiring in the breaker box, after measuring
120VAC between the dryer and the washer sitting next to it. And in the
breaker box I found black and white connected to the two-pole breaker for the
dryer, while red was tied to the ground bus.
And then there was the attempt when wiring up an outside light where the kid
decided to hook both wires from the light and both wires from the feed up to
the switch. Turned the breaker back on and the light was on all the time,
until he flipped the switch, which popped the breaker, because he had it
going _across the line_.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin