Me, The Egoist

Electrical wiring is probably one of the parts of home renovation work that I like the most. It is sufficiently challenging that you keep thinking, but not so hard that you get frustrated easily.

After my previous success in finally fishing some wire through, I decided to make a small change. I drilled another 1 inch hole in the same space between studs, but against the opposite stud. I’ll use the first hole to handle telecommunications cable like video and networking cable, while the new hole will be used strictly for electrical cable. I easily ran the electrical cable down the new hole and fished it out in the basement. It took be 3 tries to get the required amount of cable pulled, however. I left uncoiled cable loose on the second floor so that it would be able to be pulled down straight. What I didn’t expect was for it to snag the shop vac hose and get tangled up. Oh well, no biggie.

A few suggestions for anyone doing electrical wiring:

• Always route our cable from one end to the other. Don’t place a spool in the middle (even if fairly close to one end) and try to run to both ends. You will spend way too much time trying to run the second side of the pull and have a much greater chance of cutting the cable to be too short. Save your time and money.
• As you are pulling the wire, route it exactly the way you want it to be mounted. This way you don’t have any surprises (like finding out that the cable is going to be run underneath an air duct instead of above because you forgot to route it that way before nailing it down. The sad part is that I was thinking about this exact principle as I was running tonight’s power cable when I discovered that I failed to route the cable around another armored cable properly. This is in no way surprising simply because the existing wiring in the basement is fugly. It used to be worse but my father and I spent 5 days just clearing out a bunch of crap and replacing it.
• Make sure you get the deepest receptacle boxes possible. You will never go wrong with extra space in which to fold in wiring. It’s tight enough by default.
• Always run out cables into the receptacle boxes from the same side (either top or bottom). This lets you remove the retaining clip from the other side, saving about a cubic inch inside. As mentioned above, space is crucial. I discovered this tonight, actually. I decided to run the feed cable up into a receptacle box from the bottom (which made sense), but to split off the down-stream receptacles from wire coming in from the top. Oops. This is 3 incoming cables plus a receptacle which all need to fit inside the same box. It is increadable tight. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it work as-is. We’ll see. I also discovered that this is why whenever possible you want to arrange receptacles on a circuit as a chain (no more than two cables going into a box). This is because receptacles have two terminals per wire (hot or neutral) which means that you don’t need a twist-on connector cap. However, when you have two separate lines which feed off of the same incoming line at a box, you need to use twist-on connectors to allow you to make all of the required connections. This takes up a lot of space.

I managed to the wire installed tonight, cabled all the way to the breaker panel with the breaker installed and tested. This is currently feeding 2 receptacles. Next time I do some work i hope to install the final receptacle on the right branch of the feeding box, and start the long arm on the other side with 3 along that wall. Finally, good news: I no longer need to have an orange extension cord draping though the master bedroom to get power for tools in the ’slave’ bedroom.

After much consternation, I managed to get electrical cable from the bedroom that I am remodelling down to the basement. I had to drill a 1-inch hole in the 2×4 at the base of the wall to get it done, but it is strung. I haven’t hooked anything up yet; I was just happy to get the cable down at all. My main task over the next few days will be to string the cable all of the way to the breaker panel and get the receptacle installed in the bedroom. This way I can get rid of the ugly orange extension cord that I have stringing power in from the master bedroom.

My main bit of mental trouble I have going on right now is trying to decide what to do for lighting that room. The generic frosted glass light fixture that everybody uses doesn’t appeal to me all that much. I’m thinking of going with recessed lighting or maybe a bunch of wall sconces, but I haven’t a clue what to do. When I was out in Detroit, a friend poited out a whole bunch of cool things that you can do with lighting, from how he decorated his Christmas tree to how he did his office. I understood exactly all of the techniques described. I still don’t know what to do. Fortunately, I have a bunch of work to keep me busy over the next few weeks, so I’m not all that worried.Phentermine Forums And Chats
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Today, I finally took the last bit of wall down from the room I am re-doing. It was a lot of work, and only the beginning of the process, sadly. Still, I feel upbeat.

The next step is going to be to clean the room out. First, I need to chuck out the window the 15 bags of refuse I have in there. Then I spend a week vacuuming and washing down the inside of the room. Then I repair the split beam I have in there. It was repaired some time ago, but I’m not happy with the job they did, so I’m going to re-do it better. Just the beginning, and yet so far along.
Norco

Himplasia

On July 20, 2007 I fulfilled one of the key elements of the American Dream. I became a homeowner. I purchases an 100-year old 2 and a half story house just outside of Pittsburgh, Pa. It is in excellent physical shape. The wiring, however, is in need of some work.

My parents have come to town to help me move in and to help me get started on some of the construction work which I needed to have done. I’ll be posting here about the changes and events which occur, and any little bits of wisdom I come across.