Sunset 11/6/2008

The Storm Clears at Sunset

Post election day blizzard...

10 inches and still snowing hard

My Electrical Saga

As you may or may not know, I am trying to finish off my basement.  Half of it was sort of finished off in 1991 when my son Mike came back from Desert Storm and got out of the Marines.  He thought he might like to finish off an apartment, and live there for a while.  Some additional work was done on half of the other half a couple of years later by a "friend" of the family who needed the work.  He did some framing, some sheet rocking, and electrical work.  And then the basement sat there accumulating tools, old paint cans, and scraps of this and that.

This summer I decided that I would move all my tools into the garage, and make a shop there.  That project took a couple of months, but I finally got all the tools out of the basement.  The paint cans were gathered up and taken to hazardous waste disposal.  (We had one of those at the Old Lilacs... it was called the old cellar hole, and probably qualifies for the EPA Superfund program.)  That left just a lot of miscellaneous junk which I have been slowly throwing away or donating to charity.

One thing holding me back from completing the basement was the lack of adequate electrical circuits.  There were still spaces in the breaker panel, but it was impossible to get to the back of the panel without tearing down some sheet rock.  However, when we installed Central Air last year, we had to get into the panel to add a new circuit for the compressor.  I took that opportunity to fill out the panel with two more 20 amp lines.

So about a month or so ago, I attacked the remainder of the basement and completed all of the outlet circuits and put recessed cans in the ceiling.  Then I hired Cameron (who is our painter, and looking for jobs to do) to do the sheet rock, taping and painting.  Cameron's cousin, Nate, came along to help, and to do some final framing work that was required (we actually tore down a wall between two of the rooms).  In the process of doing something, he noticed that one of the outlets had a small current on the ground wire.  It was not very strong, but it was definitely a leak somewhere in the circuit.  I was filled with visions of having to rip down massive amount of sheet rock to find the wiring error.

I began the job of troubleshooting the electrical leakage this past weekend.  Since Karl happened to be online, I enlisted his opinions how how to approach the problem.  I got out a Voltmeter, and took a variety of readings, many of which were totally incomprehensible.  Just before he had to leave (probably to finish building his rear wheel) Karl suggested that I try connecting the "hot" ground with the ground on another circuit and see what current was flowing across that. 

When I succeeded in making the aforementioned connection an alarm went off.  I thought that it must have been the Home Security alarm.  We have discontinued the Security Service (we never dared to set the alarm when we were away), and I thought that the alarm was still somehow connected, and reacted to the current on the ground wire.  So I completely disassembled the Security system and unwired the alarm.

Then I tried connecting the "hot" ground to the other ground again.  Same result... alarm went off.  So now I figured it must be the smoke detector.  There was one in the basement, and one on the second floor landing.   But when I went to look for the one in the basement, it was no where to be seen.  It had been buried under the sheet rock.

Out came the cutting tool, and after two attempts, I located the smoke detector and pulled it down through the ceiling to see what might be going on.  Now, if you aren't familiar with smoke detectors, this is going to take some explaining.  The smoke detector in the basement and the smoke detector on the second floor landing were connected by a 3 wire cable (3 wires plus ground).  The power to the smoke detectors is carried on the black (hot), and white (common) wires.  The third wire (red) is used to communicate between the detectors.  If one of the detectors detects smoke, it send out a 9 volt current on the third wire, and all the detectors then sound the alarm.

When "friend" did some wiring in the basement, he had used the three wire cable as the source of the power for the new circuit.  For some reason, the ground on the three wire cable had been snipped off... It wasn't connected to anything, and really wasn't readily visible.  So "friend" must have assumed that the third wire (red) was the ground, and hooked up the ground on the new wiring to the red wire.  I am not sure how the current got into the red wire, and then into the ground wire on the new circuit, but when I tore the whole thing apart and rewired it correctly, MY PROBLEM WAS SOLVED!!!!!!

And that is my story and I am sticking to it!