So... What are YOU doing? - Part 6

[NewCreation435]

Found out earlier today that my uncle Ed passed away. He was a believer. He had been under hospice care for the last several days

 

[Lamb]

Found out earlier today that my uncle Ed passed away. He was a believer. He had been under hospice care for the last several days

My condolences. Were you close to him?

 

[Lamb]

Glad it was just the battery Lamm.

I need to go grocery shopping. I need food like veggies and cottage cheese.

I love cottage cheese!! I like it with pineapple.

 

[tango]

Fun With Cables today. I had planned to pull down some more ceiling but ended up tracing cables. One section that confused me turned out to be easy - it was a branch that included the cable I had tagged as disconnected. And it was disconnected, kind of. There used to be a light fixture in the middle of the upper ceiling (the one above the drop ceiling), but the cables were just cut off and set in cement. So I got rid of that cable, then killed the circuit and took out the other branch cable that was still live. With that done I took down some more ceiling to get to another section, then disconnected some wires and traced some more circuitry, tidied up some cables that were longer than they needed to be (for no reason other than to avoid snagging them while doing other work - they're all coming out) and finally got to a point where I know what all the cables that go in and out of a particular switch are there for. It's a hideous piece of wiring, but at least now it's known.

I have a single armored cable that goes outside through a gap between the concrete blocks of the wall. Needless to say nobody bothered to fill the gaps around the cable, and the gaps are very near to where I found an abandoned mouse nest so I obviouly wasn't the first one to find it. Looking at the size of the nut shells I found in there I'm expecting to find a larger gap because I'm not sure how a mouse could have got them through the gap I'm looking at. Maybe I'm about to make another saving on my energy bills. Anyway, as long as I can use this armored cable to pull a nice shiny new cable to the porch light I'll be in a good place - I'll be able to replace that particular branch of the circuit with a nice new cable and get rid of some more knob-and-tube wiring, and also get rid of a few ugly joins between cables.

 

[Lamb]

Doing research.

 

[NewCreation435]

My condolences. Were you close to him?

Not really. He had changed a lot over the last few years. He use to be a very mean guy and then he became a christian and he became a much nicer man after that

 

[tango]

Another generous helping of Fun With Cables. Today was the day I selected to pull a new cable to the porch light. And it shouldn't surprise anyone who has read any of my previous posts about my house to know that it didn't go as smoothly as I hoped.

First of all I found that the cable, an old armored cable, went through the outer face of the brickwork at a funny angle. The angle I could get it to through the inner face didn't give me a means to pull it with any force. So I had to chisel away some of the inner face of the brick. Then it still wouldn't give much, so I twisted it back and forth trying to break the seal between it and the cement on the outer face of the wall. Of course the outer face of the wall was inside the cavity of the porch so I couldn't get at it without dismantling parts of the porch. I really didn't want to get into doing that.

Having managed to pull and nudge and torture the cable enough that it had given about four inches, I took another look at the outside end of it. I poked it up into the cavity (with the new cable looped and taped to it) and then gave it a good pull from the inside. Much to my surprise it suddenly gave, and moved about three inches in one pull. Once I'd got to that stage I could give it another pull, and before I knew it I had a nice white cable in my hand, and the whole of the old armored cable was inside the house.

So now the armored cable is gone, four ugly joins in knob-and-tube are gone, and another ten feet or so of elderly cable is removed. The wiring situation inside is perhaps still best described as "suboptimal" but at least from here I can press forward with everything, a bit at a time. Until I get to the other porch light all the electrical work I need to do is inside the house, which isn't a bad place to be.

 

[ImaginaryDay2]

Battling an early cold bug. Echinacea usually helps stave it off and seems to be helping

 

[NewCreation435]

I got quite a bit done today. went to church, mowed the lawn, laundry, got my notes done (all 21 of them), cleaned the bathroom,

 

[Krissy Cakes]

Relaxing

 

[Lamb]

Battling an early cold bug. Echinacea usually helps stave it off and seems to be helping

Get well soon!

 

[psalms 91]

Yes thyey can be hard to shake when the weather changes so much

 

[tango]

Trying to muster up some mental energy to pull down the next section of my ceiling. I'm also thinking about how I want the new wiring to run in the section I'm working on - it will involve multiple switches in multiple locations and I'm trying to figure the best way to make it happen.

If I can see enough between the ceiling and the floor above, from the end, I might be able to figure out where the cable for the other porch light goes. All I know so far is that it's likely to be a horrendous mess.

 

[Krissy Cakes]

Waking up :read:

 

[tango]

Well I didn't work out where the cable to my porch light goes, but I did pull down another load of ceiling and fill another five bags of rubble. The total is now 17 bags and a big pile of laths. I also found another mouse nest, much bigger than any I've found before. I'm not sure how the mice were able to get to this particular spot but it's right next to the chimney so I guess it was warm for them. I'm assuming the nest is abandoned because there's no evidence of fresh mouse activity anywhere. Not that a mouse is likely to last very long these days, since our cat doesn't miss anything that looks even remotely like a mouse.

I've managed to figure out a little more of how the downstairs is wired. It still makes little sense to me but it seems the way they did things in the days of knob and tube make little sense when seen through the lens of current electrical codes. I've got a good idea where the first point in the circuit is, and I know the last point (they aren't even on the same circuit, which makes life more interesting) and if I can get a neutral core to the first point I know where I can break the circuit and split it in two. That alone will be a quite a big step forward. The trouble is getting at the first point because if that goes wrong I've got major problems on my hands. Specifically I get to choose between no light in most of the space I'm using, or a horrendous botch that makes the chaotic wiring look positively desirable.

It's handy having sections of wiring that I can just disconnect and not worry about them at all until I get to replacing everything in sight, but the areas of the house we're using can't end up permanently dark.

By the time I'm done pulling ceilings down in the room I'm working on I'm expecting to have around 30 bags of rubble, which means about 900lb of the stuff. By then I'll also probably have a couple of dozen bags of cellulose insulation to get rid of, so the whole lot can go to landfill in one hit. And a nice big fire will see to the laths. If I haven't had chance to burn them by then I'll take them to landfill as well. I'd rather not pay to get rid of them when I can burn them but if it's only going to cost a small amount it saves me standing in the sun feeding them into a burn barrel.

 

[Lamb]

Had a great day with my daughter!

 

[tango]

I discovered the reason my Fire stick wasn't working reliably was because the receptacle I was using was faulty. So this evening I set about replacing it. Needless to say it was more involved than I had hoped - when I had the new breaker panel installed the cable wasn't long enough so the electrician put a junction box in. So I took the junction box out, and replaced the whole length of cable with a nice new piece of 12-gauge. When it came to rewire the socket it turned out that the ground wire wasn't connected at all, it was wrapped around the cable sheathing. There was a ground terminal, just whoever fitted it didn't bother to actually use it. And for good measure the hot and neutral wires were connected the wrong way around.

Now it's running on a brand new piece of cable and all terminals are correctly wired. And I've got a surge protector plugged into it, which means my TV and accessories shouldn't hurt too badly if we get a power spike.

 

[NewCreation435]

I'm trying to read East of Eden by John Steinbeck, but it is 600 pages and seems like it is taking forever and really is about four or five stories all in the same book so far and only halfway through

 

[Lamb]

I'm trying to read East of Eden by John Steinbeck, but it is 600 pages and seems like it is taking forever and really is about four or five stories all in the same book so far and only halfway through

We had to read that in high school. I honestly cannot remember it but I do remember I had a disliking for it. Maybe because it was so long and it didn't interest me at all. I was a voracious reader but on my terms, not on someone else's.

 

[Krissy Cakes]

Waking up :read: