My 5’x4’ bathroom has 3 seperate circuits feeding it. There is one circuit for the lights, one for the fan, and one for the single outlet in there. Those are the only things on those 3 circuits.
My basement has fully wired electrical outlets in the walls that were just sheetrocked over when the previous owner “finished the basement”.
My basement has an electrical outlet on every other stud throughout the whole thing; they are all on the same 15A breaker.
The the upstairs bedrooms are on seperate circuits except for one outlet on the north wall of each bedroom which both share the same seperate circuit.
I think my house was wired by M.C. Escher.
I bought a house last year and I was somewhat mystified by why the two light switches next to the door were horizontal instead of the normal vertical arrangement. Turns out they had tried to turn a single box into a double by basically just gouging a bigger hole in the cinderblock wall and filling it with a softball-sized lump of caulk into which they stuffed the two switches; somehow they could only get this whole mess to stay in place by putting the switches horizontally. For bonus points, one of the switches did nothing except producing a distant humming noise and then tripping one of the breakers after a few seconds.
arcing in the walls
Yeah, when I rebuilt the kitchen/living room wall, I found the stud that had held one of the original outlets and it was scorched black where the box had been. Kind of amazing the house was still standing.
I did reuse the scorched stud. 2x4s are fucking expensive and these ones from the 1940s were perfectly straight and completely knot-free.
That also 100 percent applies to cybersecurity
I am to mention. I’m sorry.
Am electrician, can confirm.
To be fair, I don’t get called out to fix good work. If something’s fucked, it’s usually because some “handyman” who “totally knows what he’s doing” was there before.
Between that, and the fact that most of the people involved in wiring up houses are just laborers under an electrician’s supervision (ostensibly), yeah, I get plenty to complain about.
It also makes it easier, I feel, for customers to stomach the bill if I can adequately explain how much better off they are now that I’ve done my job.
Yeah, there’s a lot of questionable work out there. Many homeowners underestimate the difficulty involved in some repairs too, so there’s definitely a need to justify why it took as long as it did.
Can I ask a question: do repair electricians often cross paths with install electricians? I don’t know much about the business of the trade, but my feeling was that the folks doing installs in new houses / buildings rarely crossed paths with the ones going around repairing everything. In my mind these are like two separate worlds.
Kinda depends? But yeah they’re mostly separate.
When I worked for a shop (self-employed now), they had us divided into Construction and Service, and the two pretty much kept to themselves. Service guys looked down on Construction guys because they didn’t know much about troubleshooting; Construction guys looked down on Service guys because most of them couldn’t build their way out of a wet paper bag.
Most of my experience as an apprentice was construction. I did some service calls now and then when jobsites slowed down in the winter. Now I mostly do service calls, and, frankly, it’s a HELL of a lot easier.
Okay! That matches with my impression! I have a friend who works in construction (drywall taper) and the guy works insanely hard, always comes home from work covered head to toe in mud or dust, and is pretty much always sore. Great guy, very friendly beer drinking buddy! But that’s a kind of work I could never do, at least working for someone else.
The troubleshooting nature of repair/service electrical seems vastly more appealing to me, though I imagine with enough experience 90% of the faults become routine!
Repair electricians definitely run into the work of install electricians, but my experience is they’re mostly two different groups. Install electricians may come back to do repairs on their own work, or if there’s a lull in new construction jobs they can pick up they might fill in the hours with some smaller repair jobs.
There are some some more specialized electricians that do a mix of both, for example my company is mostly generator focused. We’re involved in both new construction and repairs for things that are generator/transfer switch/solar related.
That’s really cool! When you do repair work for a generator I assume you’re not just going to replace the generator, so I guess you have to get in there and do component level repairs? That seems really cool. I would imagine some of the technicians would have the skills of both a mechanic and an electrician for some of those jobs?
On my jobsite, working in new construction, we still complain a lot about what the people before us did. Everybody on the crew is a competent electrician, yet we still have plenty of times where we look at the most experienced electrician there and think “wth was he thinking??”
I feel love the ironic part is that both good and bad electricians can have the same outcome. Some wacky installation that works. The difference is that the bad guy probably doesn’t know why it works and/or the pros/cons. The great electrician realizes that while it’s probably not the “correct” way, it saves a ton of cost and work and is sufficient for what is being requested.
I worked on one project that was essentially one main app and then a plugin architecture where other companies could write modules that would be run inside the main app. My explicit instructions were to make it very difficult to actually write one of these modules (so that our competitors could not actually be competitive) and boy did I deliver! If my company had really wanted to deliver something like this that actually worked (in the sense of other companies being able to make real contributions) it would have been trivial to make everything HTML-based web apps.
I had to endure a roasting session where some junior developers laid into “grampa” for his absurdly bad design decisions. I suppose I deserved it, though, for my poor ethical choices.
Like, I actually had emails from the bosses talking about this shit. I really should have saved them for blackmail - no worse ethically than what I did do.
