Landing Wires in a Panel

I like making up panels. When I was first shown what is involved, my boss opened up a panel on Upper Market in San Francisco and showed me a pristine panel saying "all electricians are proud of their panels". The one he showed me was very nice, he said "i used to do them this nice, but now I don't care I just do it nice enough".

There is no "nice enough" in making up panels. When you wire up a building, you may run miles and miles of wire, but no one will really see that when it is covered up (although it is still important to make those runs neat). The panel, however, will be seen over and over again by electricians for decades to come.  It is important to make it look as good as you can.

Some electricians are concerned about slack in the wire, they loop wires and put "mickey mouse ears" on the feeders (circular loops). Honestly, if you plan your panel layout before you install the circuits, you shouldn't have to move them. It is way too much sacrifice for little return.

The way I do it, is I try to put as much length on the wire as I can but i confine wires to their own side, without much hope of switching them to the other side. I decide what is the right length to bend the wire to insert it into its lug, I measure it, and then cut a piece of sheathing to match that measurement, and I make all the wires the same length, i trie to make all the bends equal in radius, everything should look as uniform as possible.

If you can make an incredible panel, no one will care except the right people, and that is very important. I like the way I wired up those 3 panels recently, but I know each time I do one, it should look better than the last. It should look like a work of art.

Why Grounding Is Important.

When I talk to clients, I often find that they will be quit a bit concerned about grounding. I imagine we are all indoctrinated to believe that grounding is very important to safety, which is good, because it is important to safety. However, I find it amusing that people might really be concerned about it but not really know what it does, what its function is.

I think if you asked most people who thought they knew what grounding was, they would say that it dumps electricity into the ground instead of starting a fire or electrocuting you. If you said it in a more proper way, it would go like this, grounding provides a path of low resistance for the electricity to flow to. Electricity always follows the path of least resistance, so if it comes in contact with something that is grounded then the electricity will flow to the ground.

That concept in and of itself is a little vague and often misunderstood. It is okay not to understand the concept of grounding, in the 1993 National Electrical Code, there were factual errors in describing why something must be grounded, and this code is written by scientists, engineers, and people from the field with lots of experience.

Here is an explanation of what grounding is most commonly used for and what it does. If you have an outlet and the device and the box it is attached to is grounded, then any stray current will go to ground, but we are not just talking a little trickle, we are talking, in just a few cycles, suddenly your little wires are drawing 10,000 amps of current. A grounded box will cause a short circuit when it draws electricity to ground and it makes a little flash that will melt any metal because it is hotter than the surface temperature of the sun. In effect, when you ground something, you are ensuring that if anything goes wrong, a very severe lightning bolt is going to go through your house.

Now that doesn’t sound safe at all. It certainly doesn’t to me, the reason why it is done for “safety” reasons, is because all that current is most certainly going to trip the breaker, and cause the circuit to go dead. So instead of the ground fault making your box heat up and start a fire, or electrocuting anyone, it is like an instantaneous loud siren that goes off for a split second and trips the breaker.

What if the breaker didn’t work? Well, as you can imagine it is pretty important for it to work, because it will vaporize everything in the circuit and perhaps cause all sorts of untold damage.

Still we always want to make sure everything is grounded, because breakers do work and stray current will kill the power and that is the object of the game.

Its a Push-In World

My first encounter with push-in connectors, ever, was when a general contractor, whom I didn’t admire too much, used them to install a Halo recessed light. I had just started working for him, and was soon to stop working for him, and I couldn’t believe he wanted me to install a recessed can made by Halo. Halo to me is the Home Depot Brand, if it goes in successfully, which is a bit of a challenge, it won’t last for as long as it should. I always use Juno, a brand developed in the late seventies for electricians by electricians, so we could install something and die of old age before we get called back to fix it.

So there he was pushing the wires into the connectors and I was thinking of ways to not work for him again. Connectors to me seemed like another cheap quick fix that turns everyone on but doesn’t have any improvement over a real wire nut.

Wire nuts have been the standard since electricians stopped soldering wires together. They were a great invention. I mean, you could do something in half the time and your splice would last twice as long. Personally, I’ve always believed in wire nuts because of the twist. A sub standard electrician will twist a wire nut until he feels some tension and then figure the wires are spliced. A real electrician will feel that tension and keep twisting. He will twist until all the wires are twisted together, until the wire nut is practically unnecessary, it is just a cap on top of two or more wires that are so entangled that it would require a bit of strength to pull them apart, even if the wire nut is off.

Wiring up boxes, I took pride in having muscles in my hands that could twist five number twelve  wires together into a tight unit. I loved my wire nuts and they loved to do their job right.

Enter Skip.

Skip is the legendary electrician I began working for. Legendary, because he has his own set of rules, so sophisticated and well though-out, he could write his own code book, that would make any job twice as safe. The NEC is known as the “bare minimum standard”. Skip would write the code that was “the standard”. He really is a good electrician, and it is a shame that he isn’t as successful as he could be. He has taught many an apprentice that has gone on to do bigger more sophisticate projects than he, and make more money.  Alas, he works for a company that pays him a mere prevailing wage, without a good retirement plan. Legend has it he spends some weekends in his room with the blinds closed, without any clothes, writing Wikipedia articles about electrical theory.

My first day working for Skip, he handed me two jars of push in connectors and two bags of wire nuts and told me I could use whichever I felt most comfortable with, and that he felt most comfortable with the push-ins. In that moment, my attitude towards push-ins changed in an instant. I wasn’t willing to use them, for sure. Wiring up a house means you are putting other people’s lives in your hands, perhaps MANY GENERATIONS of lives in your hands, we don’t make changes on the fly, but my curiosity was suddenly stimulated, I was at that moment determined to try push-in connectors, if only with scrap wire on the side. I figured if Skip Logan endorsed them, they must be worth considering.

I did try them, over, and over again, on the side. A good electrician has to see things with his own eyes, he has to feel, touch and smell things, before his confidence in something can start to grow. I tried them, until the inevitable happened: I thought “God, I’m wasting money with practicing these connectors on something that is UL listed for all this anyways”. So instead of wasting money, I started making up boxes with push in connectors. My whole career changed.

Wow, that is a lead up to endorsing push in connectors if I ever saw one, but they are great. The best part is that they do not mess up the wires. “The twist” keeps wires together, but so does a push in connector, and if you need to alter the twist in any way, it is a pain in the ass. With push ins, you can modify your box on the fly, just pull out and change it up. Your wires will stay straight and pristine. After using push-ins for over six months now, I am happy to say that they make more space in boxes, they are faster, easier to use, and they are reliable. I really doubt that many electricians will be using wire nuts in 30 years.

The secret to using push in connectors is to apply your electrician’s paranoia to your application of the push-ins. They com with a clear casing so you can see if they are pushed in all the way. You have to make double, triple, quadruple sure that they are connected right. When they are connected right, they are as good as anything, except with all the added, easy-to-miss features, they are even better.

I should write another article about all the processes necessary to make sure that a push-in is used safely, but to be sure, if it is used safely, it is the Cadillac of connectors.

Tripped Breaker

Today I was called out to a home for a tripped breaker. Now the guy knew the breaker was tripped and he had tried to put it back on. I was actually referred to this job by another electrician who was too busy, so I didn't talk to the client on the phone, if I had, I probably wouldn't have come out there.

This is a common story, the breaker is tripped, the person tries to turn it back on, it won't go back on. If it the attempt to turn it on is done right, and it still won't go one, it normally means one thing, a short circuit. In that case, it is worth calling an electrician to come find the short. This wasn't such a case.

What I discovered when I went out there was something I get called out for about 2-3 times a year, the last time it was a general contractor that needed help. The circuit appeared to be fine, perhaps it had gotten overloaded by too many amps, I turned on the breaker and left, that was all I had to do (for now at least, if it trips again, there could be a bigger problem).

With all breakers, when it gets overloaded and trips, the switch goes to the middle. To attempt to turn it to the "on" position from the middle position, is futile. This is where people get tripped out, no pun intended. The breaker must first be turned to the "OFF" position first, this resets the tripping mechanism, and then it will easily go back to "on" and stay there, if everything is working properly.

So if your breaker trips for a reason that isn't faulty wiring. Turn it "off" then turn it "on". This might save you a lot of hassle to have an electrician come out. He could very well charge you a service fee of $100+ dollars for the house call and fix everything in 30 seconds.

I find this happens especially with Cutler Hammer and Challenger brand breakers.

20 Amp Plug in a 15 Amp Receptacle

Today I was called into a cafe. They told me they had a plug that was smoking. When they gave me the address, I was a little surprised that I was called to that place. It is a cafe at the bottom of a condominium complex that was built just five years ago. That means everything in there was built new, according to today’s strict code standards. So something must not have been used right for a problem to occur, either that or a manufacturing defect.

I walked into a clean, new cafe with a strong, distinct smell of burning electrical parts. The owner showed me the plug, it was burnt out in the hot prong on top. This is a fairly common problem. Plugs burn out. Often it is from a lose connection, perhaps the plug loosening up by being treated to roughly. It is also often caused by liquid. When a receptacle gets wet, it can burn out. Basically, when you have a loose connection or liquid in a plug, little arcs can occur, the temperature of these arcs go up to 10,000 C, and they always cause damage, no matter how minute.

I told the owner that it was probably from liquid. The plug is in a bad location, about 16 in from the floor right under the counter where drinks get passed to the customers. Employees can bang the plug with their legs, they can also spill drinks on it, it can also get wet from cleaning after hours, from the mop and such.

We both figured that was the problem. So I ran to the hardware store two blocks away and got a matching receptacle. A white, rectangular, 15 amp receptacle. I put it in, and that is when I found out the real cause of the problem.

I tried to plug the case refrigerator in and realized what had happened. The plug at the end of the cord was designed for a 20 amp receptacle.
They had taken the horizontal prong for the grounded side, and had twisted it with pliers or to fit into a vertical slot. The slot they had twisted was the one that was burnt out. I immediately realized that that was the problem. I went and got a 20 amp receptacle and now I imagine they won’t have any problem with that outlet for a long time.

Whoever did this, they were making a quick, cheap fix. It worked … for 2 years and it ended up with a cafe full of smoke, which is located underneath many, many dwelling units. Someone wanted to save a few buck to have an electrician put in the proper plug, but they potentially could have cost a lot of damage. I mean, its thing

Find That GFI

Today I was called out to a house because the bathroom receptacles were not working. The client had a thick accent, if I had heard everything correctly, I would have told her how to solve the problem on the phone.

I got there and realized that when the house was built, all required GFI outlets outside the kitchen (bathroom, and outside) had been put in series with one GFI. These were tract houses done to the cheapest possible standards. I mean, they saved a total of $40 by doing it this way.

I proceeded to look for the GFI that had tripped and turned off the plugs in three bathrooms, and one plug outside. I looked, and I looked and I looked. I had done this in a similar place before, and we found the GFCI behind some boxes in the Garage.

After an hour and a half of looking, I was wondering what could be wrong here. I decided to ask a neighbor, which is what everyone probably should have done in the first place. The neighbor came in the garage and walked right up to it. It was behind a hanging shoe rack in the garage. Of course we should have found it, it seems like we looked everywhere else in the garage, but we were all relieved that we had found it. One push of the button on the face of the GFI and everything was working again, or for the first time since they had moved in.

I charged them the very minimum, mainly for the gas and time it took to get out there.

One of the most common troubleshooting jobs I get, and I'm sure with other electricians, is where the devices in the circuit are wired in series, and when when one device blows, all the others after it go out. I almost never wire anything in series. I can only think of doing it on a GFCI like this, but even then I only do it when the other devices are in the same room.