Pages are divided up by project: Back to the main projects page. Electrical upgrade. from the ground up. ~mike gradziel.
In 1939, this house was given a state-of-the-art electrical system with insulated copper wire run through porcelain tubes and support knobs, painstakingly soldered and taped at joints and routed neatly throughout the walls and attic. Nowadays, we have sensitive electronics that need surge protectors to survive thunderstorms, and grounded metal housings to cut down on electromagnetic interference. Plus, mankind has realized it is much safer to have a low resistance path to ground in every appliance and electrical outlet so when hot wires touch things they aren't supposed to, breakers will trip right away. I was using an extension cord run across the house from the kitchen to power my computer. We needed new wiring, more circuits, and more convenient light switches; after cleaning up the attic I got an electrical permit and got to work. Some years ago the kitchen was remodeled, and electrical service was upgraded to 100 amps getting rid of the old fuse box but replacing it with a rather small load center, with just twelve slots for circuits. Most of these went to the new kitchen, leaving the rest of the house on three old circuits. It was a sloppy, low-bid sort of job with wires snaking loosely across the attic and other unsafe things like sharing a neutral between two circuits without using a double pole breaker. I decided to completely replace the load center and use the old one out in the back shed for my wood shop. And to start from a solid foundation, I put in four new copper-clad ground rods in the front yard to make a nice low-resistance ground. Some people think that's excessive, but materials were inexpensive and now I can be sure that my surge protectors will work.
Bathroom re-wiring quickly became a larger project. Most light switches in the house are 54 inches above the floor, to the top of the switch, which is 6 inches higher than is common these days. The switch just felt too high, and smaller children wouldn't be able to reach it, but to move it down I had to remove some tile. The tile backsplash was so tall that the wall outlets I planned to install behind the sink would be rather far from the countertop, but more importantly the mirror lower edge would be high, again to the disadvantage of small children. Off came the tile, a tedius job because I wanted to save as many tiles as possible to repair damaged tile elsewhere in the room. I certainly don't want to re-tile the whole room right now! I would have a pickup-truck-full of debris, we would be without any bathroom for quite a while (not feasible!) and it would be costly. Plus, they built this so well in 1939: chicken wire mesh in the concrete stucco, making it hold together without cracks all these years. It was not easy to take off by hammer and chisel. Now we plan to replace the sink and re-tile the upper decorative edge all the way around the room. Plus, I'm adding a ventilation fan with special design features at the intakes to make it extra-quiet. This black granite sink is wrong for the color scheme, so we decided to put in a two-basin white porcelain sink.
Next, I am wiring the bedroom that for a whole year now we have been waiting to move into. I'm exactly one year behind schedule, on account of cleaning the attic. I'm really happy it's clean, though - wiring is so much easier and I am proud of being able to do a nice neat safe job. I sealed off the room and protected the floor with plastic and cardboard, then did strategic demolition. Had I removed all the walls I could have insulated better and hung drywall, but that would have left me with a truckload of plaster debris and a lot more work. Plus, who knows what ancillary projects would be spawned: as it is, I've already discovered some rot in one window frame. After mounting the boxes and running wire from the new panel via the attic, I made connections at junction boxes to minimize the wires in each switch or receptacle box. With my volume of buying, boxes are cheaper than wire so it makes sense to minimize wire. Except I decided to use all 12-gauge, instead of using 14-gauge for lighting circuits. This will cost me about $100 throughout the house, but it is more convenient having just two types of NM-cable (12-2 and 12-3) on hand.
The master bedroom lighting is as good as it gets: one switch at the door plus two more one on each side of the bed, all for the overhead light; also, two dimmable sconces switched separately bedside; also, closet lighting with wall-mounted switches. And the smoke alarms will be hard-wired, so they all go off together when tripped. On top of all that, I have enough receptacles to plug in anything we could ever want. I decided not to run any data cable since we have no current use for it, and I can cut a hole in the wall later to install is almost as easily as I could cut a hole now. The wall had wallpaper, originally; a dark red color with a white pineapple motif. I wonder what, seventy years from now, will people look at in my house and say to themselves, "what were they thinking!!" All those light fixtures, maybe; I suppose by then we will have luminous ceiling paint. Removing painted-over wallpaper is no fun at all: wearing my respirator, on a ladder, with my scraper I have to work over every inch of surface. Wetting it hasn't helped much. Then I will have to wet-scrape the residual paper, wash off the paste, and touch up the plaster.
In the garage, I wanted to run a copper ground from my new larger subpanel to the main breaker where my deluxe four-rod ground system terminates. The last installer used metal conduit as the ground path, with all its screw fittings adding risk and resistance (though this is common and entirely legitimate), and the 1-inch conduit was too small to legally run a copper ground alongside the other three wires. I had to replace the conduit. Fortunately I was able to re-use the same 2 AWG copper conductors and neutral which was nice because it is very expensive, and I will be able to use the old 1-inch conduit in the crawlspace for the run to the back yard shed. I bought 90-degree pre-bent elbows and ten foot straight sections of inch-and-a-quarter conduit and then made several slight bends in the most low-tech, low-cost way possible: I stuck one end of the conduit in a hole in the ground and pulled on the other end. The rounded edge of the hole distributed the load for a uniform curvature, and I had my conduits done in a few hours without having to hire anyone or rent equipment. This was very satisfying. I bonded the conduit to the copper ground wire at both ends so one-way surges won't be stopped up by an inductive choke. The next day I shut off power to the house, got an extension cord hookup from our neighbor, and pulled down all the old conduit. I enlarged the hole in the service entrance box (fortunately the hole in the stucco was already big enough) and sealed in the new conduit with rubber sealant, then with Joy's help ran the conduit in sections slipping conduit over wire rather than pulling wire through conduit which is not really possible with wires this big going around corners. I got the cables terminated in the panel, wired in all my new circuits, and then untangled the mess of kitchen circuit wires in the attic and fed them in to the new panel. The electrician who did that job left a mess of wires and twice used 3-conductor wire to power two circuits with a shared neutral without using a double-pole breaker, a hazardous configuration that was hard to detect (I could have shut off one circuit to work on it while the neutral still carried 20 amps from the other circuit). I used the right breakers, so it is now legal though a neutral fault will supply 240 volts to half the things in my kitchen, and the double pole breakers were more than twice the cost of two single pole breakers. Oh well, having it done beats cutting into the kitchen walls to run new wire. As dusk arrived, I switched on the power and we had light! Except for the living and dining rooms, that is; they are next in line for re-wiring.
I opened a trench to the back yard shed where I plan to build a woodworking shop. The plan was to run three 6-gauge stranded conductors plus an 8-gauge stranded copper ground conductor through watertight 1-inch plastic tubing, transitioning to steel EMT under the house. Eventually I accomplished this but it was far harder to pull the wire than I expected. Even the slightest bends and spirals in the hose would add up; tension is, after all, an exponential function of the number of spirals times friction. Rather than pull the whole bundle of wire through at once I had to do one wire at a time, with plenty of cable lube. One of the neighbor's sprinkler loops was broken and my trench kept filling with sixty gallons of water, which I would have to bail out. Finally it was done, with the metal EMT grounded properly at both ends to prevent it forming an inductive choke in lightning storms, etc. The plastic hose is 18 inches down. About 14 inches down in the same trench, I lay water pipe for new sprinkler loops. My electrical inspector recommended that I have the power company come by and convert this unprofessional line connection to something more durable and safe. Evidently handyman electricians will connect the house to the lines themselves to avoid having to schedule the electric company to do this. There was a permit for the service upgrade, but I did not look up the inspection status for it. In any case now it is all cleaned up with nifty finger-trap crimped cable connectors.
March 2010: The dining room and half of the living room, including the lighting circuits, are finally done. No more extension cords and floor lamps! Actually there will be one floor lamp in the living room, on a receptacle controlled by two switches. I tried out all sorts of wall sconce ideas but we settled on this as being the most flexible and best looking. I had a real battle with paint blisters on the living room wall. After hours of internet research, consulting with the paint store salesmen, and scrutinizing the blisters, I still am not sure what causes them or how to prevent them. The blisters bubble out within a few minutes of laying on a coat of paint, and they are concentrated around the perimeter of my plaster patches. They don't happen elsewhere on the wall so I think it has something to do with the sandpaper scoring the original paint, which then allows moisture from the new paint to seep behind the older paint and displace air which jets out making little blisters from 1mm to several mm across. Some even looked like mushrooms, tall and skinny, clearly the result of a gas pushing out. Exasperated by all the gouges in my new wall, so painstakingly tooled and smoothed to look like the rest of the plaster, I scraped off the new paint and re-plastered. This time I applied a premium primer/sealer of the same brand as the topcoat paint, rather than the generic one I had used, working with a very dry paint roller and making many layers. I still got blisters, but not so many, and after cutting away and spot priming them I put on the top coat in many thin layers starting out mottled and gradually filling in with color. That seems to have worked, preventing moisture from getting back to the poorly adhered paint layer. The lesson is that a sloppy surface preparation will doom painters for decades to come, so pay for a good crew or doi it right yourself. I hope I don't have to repaint for decades.
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