A tale of woe, including carelessness, stupidity and laziness....

[Jon Elson]

On 08/26/2015 12:02 PM, tony duell wrote:
>> Yup, in the first house I owned, i had a "computer room".
> Whereas now you have a 'computer house' ?
>
>
>> The previous owner had done some retrofits and installed an
>> outlet in a closet.  I plugged a printer into that outlet,
>> and my computer (S-100, CP/M) into another on the opposite
>> wall.  Some strange things happened, some chips got blown, I
>> didn't know why.  Then, finally, I put my hand on the
>> printer and something connected to the computer and got a
> You were very lucky. An arm-to-arm shock is about the most
> dangerous you can get. That (of course) is why you keep your
> left hand behind your back  when working on anything with
> high votlages.
I guess I have good heart circuitry, as I have gotten this 
type of shock a number of times, without any terrible thing 
happening. Always when totally unexpected, as I was not 
AWARE that what I'd be doing had any shock potential.
>
>> big shock.  Quickly investigating, I found a Romex staple
>> had been driven through the Romex, severing the safety
>> ground and tying it to the hot!  This was back before outlet
>> testers were common items.  Well, that explained some blown
>> chips, etc.
> OUCH!. I've seen some dubious wiring in my time (and just becasue
> somebody has the right bit of paper to say they are a qualified
> electrician does not mean they do good wiring in my experience!)
> but that is lethal. Don't they test wiring after it's installed? Over here
> you are certainly supposed to (and a megger would pick that up
> even if the short wan't quite there yet).
>
>
Oh, YEAH, this place was later found to have some REALLY 
dubious wiring, that must have been missed by several 
inspectors.  They had a fire there quite some time before I 
moved in.  There was burned wiring in a basement ceiling 
with the Romex outer jacket melted off, and the inner wires 
deteriorated.  They had a feed for some baseboard heaters 
with 30 A breakers that had been re-routed to ordinary 
outlets.  This was all presumably done by a previous owner.  
Well, we KNOW why they had a fire, don't we?

I've never met a residential electrician that would even 
know the WORD "megger".  Certainly, they don't use them to 
check house wiring.

Jon