Tag: wiring

Boiler Update

October 19, 2011 / / 1 Comment

The weather has been especially fickle as of late. After my initial test firing of the boiler it promptly got warm again and stayed that way for a couple of weeks. When it got colder again, I went to fire up the boiler. Since it worked fine the first time, I didn’t anticipate any problems. Unfortunately, the initial success was not reproducible. I suspected the gas control knob since it had been –shall we say– sticky. In order to find out I had to get a multimeter so I could trace back the electrical connections.

Things seemed to be good. I was getting current, though it seemed a bit erratic, and there wasn’t a clear reason that the burner wouldn’t light. I redo all of the wiring because it was a mess, with old cracked wire and lots of places that could be shorting. Even so, nothing was working. A few days went by and I was running out of things to check and the house was getting cold. Then, Sarah sends me a video while I’m at work.

I ask her to disconnect the thermostat and when I get home I can no longer get any signal from the transformer. So I ordered a new transformer. The house gets colder and colder until we can see our breath while watching TV. Have I mentioned there’s no insulation in this house? Despite paying for rush shipping, the part takes almost a week to arrive.

I install the new transformer and sure enough, the weather suddenly gets warm and then hot. With it eighty degrees in the house, I can’t easily test the system, so I move on to other things. Then this past week, it starts to get cold again. I flipped the switch on the thermostat, went downstairs… and nothing was happening. Incidentally, somewhere in this process I learned that the system is steam, not hot water, so while there is a cold water feeder, it isn’t powered. Everything just runs low voltage.

I break out the multimeter again and test voltage at each connection. Nothing. No juice at all, even out of the new transformer. I test the power coming into the transformer, and the line tester beeps affirmative. It doesn’t make sense. I test resistance between the terminals of the transformer and confirm it isn’t shorted. Finally, I disconnect the new transformer to inspect it and make sure I’m not missing something. Everything looks fine.

Unsure what else to try, I hook the transformer back up. I’m not sure what I did differently, but this time the transformer was live. I connected the wires, testing at each point with the multimeter. Signal is getting through the pressure cutoff, but when it gets to the low water cutoff switch, it stops. It’s in alarm state. The strange thing is that I know the low water cutoff works. If I drain water from the system, it fills it back up. There seems to be a problem with the mechanism that connects the switch to the actual water feeder. According to the documentation, it could be several things, with different parts to replace. Since I know the low water feed is working, I take the chance and simply bypass the switch.

The last stop for the wire is the gas control valve. I turn off the thermostat and reconnect the valve. I relight the pilot. I run back upstairs and switch on the thermostat. As I come back down the stairs I can hear it: the boiler is firing. Finally.

Sarah and I went back upstairs and watched tv. In about half an hour we started hearing noises from the radiators. They started getting warm. They hissed a little. The pipes banged. Most importantly, the house got warm. I checked pressure, made sure it shut off when it reached the right temperature, and it’s continued to work beautifully –if noisily– the last few days. It just needs to make it through this winter. Next year we’ll start work on our massive HVAC undertaking. For now, we have heat. All it cost me was time and about twelve dollars for the transformer.

Attic Electric

August 16, 2011 / / 2 Comments

The last few days at the house I’ve spent a lot of time in the attic. The wiring is a bit… custom. Despite a bunch of breakers in the electrical box for the upstairs, only four circuits are actually used for everything. We haven’t figured out what the rest are for yet. Fortunately, in one of those rare positives of the house, all of the electric for the upstairs is really easy to get to because it’s all run in the attic in the flexible conduit. Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t ancient fabric-wrapped wiring inside the conduit, because there is, but I’ll take easy-to-get-to wiring any day. First I mapped out where everything went.

Wiring diagram

If you can’t tell from my crappy sketch, the exciting part is where the one wire goes to the kitchen ceiling to the bathroom outlet and the bathroom light, then to the office ceiling, then to the office outlet and the living room outlet. Oh, and when we put those outlets in the kitchen, they were off of the bathroom outlet. That’s all one circuit, and we both have power-hungry desktop computers and a laser printer. Clearly I needed to do something about it or we’d be tripping the circuit constantly, if not burning the house down. That meant spending more time in the attic.

Original electrical

This isn’t being used, but I wanted to share it anyway. This is the bare wire on porcelain insulators from when the house was originally wired. Because the house has remnants of gas lighting, we think it was electrified after it was built, but this wiring means all the flexible conduit stuff was a retrofit done years later. Before I get to my wiring escapades, I have one more attic discovery to share.

Zombie rat

Sarah was in the attic when I found this guy above the bathroom. He’s well on his way to decomposed, but was so stiff that I could stand him up and pose him for a quick photo. Sorry if you’re squeamish, but I was laughing like a little kid when I took this picture.

Anyway, back to the wiring. I disconnected the office from the bathroom. There was a line running from a box at the back of the attic all the way to the front of the house where it went to a blanked outlet. The box in the attic also went to an outlet in the kitchen. We turned off that circuit and I cut the line. Imagine my surprise when sparks came out as I cut the conduit! Whoops! An investigation of the box revealed three wire cable run from the basement. Basically there were two separate circuits coming into the box and splitting up, one to each outlet, and sharing a neutral. I swapped the two, which put the kitchen outlet on the same circuit as another outlet in the kitchen. That left me with a dedicated circuit for the office. I got that hooked up and ran the living room outlet off the living room fan.

High quality wiring

I thought everything was done, or at least, once I’d resolved a short in the kitchen ceiling fan receptacle and a mis-wiring of the bathroom light switch, until I came to the bedroom. You may remember this picture from when we took down the drop ceiling in the bedroom and disconnected the track lighting.

Ceiling receptacle

Well when I went to put the ceiling fan into the bedroom I realized that the receptacle was only a half-inch deep, and the way the fan mounted I needed a receptacle with a bit more depth. So we picked one up on one of our frequent trips to the hardware store. The problem was that the original receptacle was directly over a ceiling joist and nailed into it, while the deeper-set receptacle mounted to the side of it. No problem, just cut the hole a couple of inches bigger on one side and it’s all set. Well, I got into a bit of a hurry and grabbed the reciprocating saw, which would have been fine except that it’s plaster and lath, not drywall.

Ceiling problem

Crap. So I managed to get the new receptacle installed and the wiring connected, but now we need to patch up the ceiling before I can install the fan. Oh well, we’ll get there. Did I mention that cutting the hole caused a rain of dust, rat turds, and random ceiling debris? Onto the new carpet that Sarah just installed? Fun stuff. At least we’re almost ready to move in.

 

The Little Things

August 5, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes the things that make a place seem crappy or nice are very small. Once the living room was painted I replaced the electrical outlets with nice new ones. The old outlets were just one more manifestation of the wealth of wrong that permeates the house like some fetid disease.

Every time we plugged in a fan, a delicate balancing act ensued where you tried to gingerly step away and not have the plug simply fall out of the outlet. “Why not simply spread or narrow the prongs on the plug, so it holds?” I hear you thinking. I mean, I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the first thing most people do when confronted with a plug that won’t stay in. Suffice it to say that indeed occurred to me as well and despite all manner of bending, it simply hung out of the outlet as though the plug felt dirty for being put into such disgusting places, and was merely trying to escape.

Old outlet

The outlet had been painted at some point or three, it was connected with fabric-wrapped corroded copper wire, and of course the polarity was backwards. After removing the old, broken thing, it disintegrated like a vampire exposed to sunlight.

Properly wired

The new outlet, one of the Decora-style Levitons I’m a fan of, literally makes the entire room feel newer. Now, the fans gleefully remain plugged in to its slick, tamper-resistant, hot-and-neutral-correctly-wired, properly grounded new outlet.

New outlet

It’s the smallest thing imaginable. Five minutes to install, less than three dollars for both the outlet and the vinyl, crack-proof cover, and yet such an amazing effect.

Kitchen Outlet

July 15, 2011 / / 2 Comments

Scary Electrical

Let me start by saying that the electrical situation in the house is, in a word, scary. We have two 100-amp service lines coming in with separate breakers for the first and second floor units. This seems fairly normal. However, the basement was finished into an illegal apartment. When they did this, or maybe just in the course of doing all of the other terrible things, they spliced into the main for the upstairs unit before the breaker, added some wires, and wrapped it up (poorly) with electrical tape, like some sort of gift that is also a fire hazard. Of course nothing is labelled, and strung together, taped, patched, and generally awful wiring pervades the house. We have the old fabric-wrapped wire, lengths of live wire less than a couple of feet long spliced in at each end in the laundry room, draped over water pipes.

The house is a hundred and fifteen years old. When it was built, electricity was still something for expositions and rich people, which is why the house still has gas light fixtures here and there and a place where the wood stove used to sit. It was eventually electrified, of course, though it was done –shall we say– “sparingly”. There are two outlets in the kitchen, and just one in every other room upstairs, except for the tiny front bedroom which has none at all.

Unfortunately, the two outlets in the kitchen are positioned as far as possible from where the cabinet and counters were and will be again. There’s no outlet for the stove, no electric for a dishwasher or range hood, and no outlet for the kitchen counter, where we might want, say, a toaster. We’re not even sure where we’ll plug in the microwave, and we’re slightly concerned that when we do find a place, making popcorn will burn the house down.

All of this brings us to one of the myriad projects underway in the kitchen: adding an outlet. As luck would have it, there’s an outlet on the opposite side of the wall in the bathroom. We replaced the existing outlet with a GFCI (because, duh, it’s a bathroom). We need to get some spacers so that it will sit flush with the tile in the bathroom because at the moment it’s sunk three-eights of an inch into the wall.

Bathroom outlet

The challenge was that the opposite side of the wall in the kitchen is tiled, and cutting through the tile proved to be more difficult than expected. For starters, I didn’t own a Dremel. I tried using a drill, a jigsaw, and a trim router, but without the right bit, blade, or bit the results were less than stellar. I managed to grind off all the teeth on the jigsaw bit, but eventually I got a decent outlet-sized hole in the wall. Not long after, Sarah’s dad returned from Home Depot with a Dremel.

Cutting the tile

The Dremel quickly straightened out the hole and made it usable. We got the wire connected to the GFCI in the bathroom and ran it out of the wall in the kitchen. For the time being that’s as far as we’ve gotten, because we need to patch in a line for the range hood and the dishwasher. We’re not sure yet if the dishwasher will fit next to the stove or if we need to put it on the wall to the left. That will determine where we need to run the wire.

Kitchen outlet hole

We also tried to put an outlet behind the stove, but the tile there is different and proved quite resilient to my efforts. I decided that we can just plug the stove into the counter outlet. It isn’t permanent, after all, and it doesn’t need to be perfect. As usual, what seemed like a small project took much longer than expected and the result –aside from the new hole in the wall with a wire sticking out of it– was an impressive mess of tools in the kitchen.

Kitchen mess

If nothing else, you can see the new peel-and-stick tile Sarah and Meg put down, as well as the no-longer-crazy plumbing that Sarah’s dad helped me straighten out.