New York Renovator

Now that good weather is finally here, I’m turning my plans once again to updating the electrical system in the home. It’s been a slow, long process, and I still only have half the house done! I have to keep up-to-date with the codes, as well, to make sure that all my work is done properly and legally. The biggest change I have seen is with new “arc-fault” circuit breaker. This was introduced in the National Electric Code in 2002, but we’re seeing it roll into the municipalities codes’ laws only recently. My town passed the regulation for these last year.

The arc-fault circuit breaker has a little pigtail wire that connects to the grounding bar in the circuit panel, and the white wire connects to a screw on the breaker. This new system detects “arcing,” or the electrical shorts that sometimes occur (and shorts occur in new AND old wiring) with overheating wires, poorly performing wires, or broken or loose wires.

Regular circuit breakers only protect the wire behind the walls (switches and outlets) when massive amounts of electricity surge through the line; they flip off,  preventing heat buildup (and thus, a fire). Arc-fault circuit breakers are a little more sensitive– these breakers have filters that detect impending arcs from things like loose wire/screw connections, nicked wires, brittle or cracked wiring, and etc. Because they are so sensitive, they sometimes go off intermittently and falsely (and the homeowner must trot down the basement to flick the breaker back on, or figure out why the breaker is switching off).

A few years ago, these arc-fault breakers were mandated for bedrooms and sleeping areas for new construction (most arc-related fires occur in bedrooms). I believe in New York State, this applies. Vermont, however, has recently required the use of these arc-fault breakers for ALL living rooms in residences. The caveat is that the arc-fault equipment is a lot more expensive than the traditional breaker equipment. I can find regular circuit breakers for $10 or so. The arc-fault breakers are commonly $45 to $50!! PER BREAKER! This radically increases the cost of electrical wiring.

Anyway, this information may come in handy the next time you need to gut a room to rewire it, or look at an estimate for new construction. I’m hoping that by the time I get to the bedrooms in my house, the arc-fault breakers will be more reliable– the last thing I want to do it pay 5x more for something that I have to monitor 5x more– and less expensive.

Photos from Handyman Wire and Inspect-A-Pedia NY.

Here’s something terrific! Buy electrical supplies online! I would never buy electrical supplies from just anyone, though– who knows where it was manufactured, if it is codes-applicable, or if it was made in the U.S.? I only buy new stuff, and I only get it from reputable sellers. I saw some great deals (as usual) at Buy.com. Check out their sale page, distributed weekly. They have great sales all the time, on electronics, small appliances, and loads of stuff. But Buy.com also sells tons and tons of other products, including housewares, tools, home and garden supplies, and electrical equipment! There are some really good prices on circuit panel boxes, electrical testing tools, and these nice arc-fault circuit breakers (AFCI) that I have been looking into. These new circuit breakers are now required in all residential buildings in my township, in accordance to the National Electric Code. But the breakers are WILDLY expensive at my local retailer. Plus, paying sales tax on these babies can easily break my little piggy bank…

Well, at Buy.com, they are affordable, and I don’t have to pay sales tax! Very cool.

Buy.com also sells electrical tape, sockets, feed hubs, voltage testers, specialty pouches and belts, and various other supplies. Great deals! Some stuff comes with free shipping, too. And don’t limit Buy.com to just that– Buy.com has e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g! Books, shoes, jewelry, home appliances big and small, parts for appliances, patio furniture, gadgets, home decor items, LOADS of stuff. Prices are great, and customer service is superb. Keep Buy.com in mind when you’re looking for stuff. And save yourself some gas and time– it’s easy to order all the stuff you need, right on the Net.

One of my favorite blogs is Electrician’s Notes, and blogger Sparky has had some really good posts lately. He’s been showcasing some of the nightmares discovered in homes concerning their electrical wiring. I am closely associating with the posts (and photos), because my home is a nightmare, too!

My house was built in 1855, and has remained largely unrenovated since then. But there have been a few additions throughout the decades, one being electrical wiring installed in the 1930s. Believe it or not, until two years ago, 98% of my electrical system was running through those 80-year old, knob-and-tube wires. I had no idea how horrible the system was until 2006, when I completely gutted the living room. This is an example of one of the ugly blackheads I discovered when I pulled down the ceiling.

Apparently, the previous owners had ripped up the floorboards on the second floor above, installed the wiring for most of the house in between those floor joists, and closed up the floor again with the old floor boards. (See how close some of the nails are to the wiring between the joists). The owners in the 1960s slathered the second floor flooring with glue and installed this disgusting-looking yellow lineoleum in the bedrooms, making it impossible to see the damage done.

So last year, when I pulled down the ceiling in the living room below, I found this massive wiring disaster: open wires, spliced wires connected ONLY with black electrical tape. A disaster. A lot of the “improvements” are disasters. The previous owners had insulated the attic floor in the 1980s, where more of this black-cloth knob-and-tube wiring was located (it’s against codes to insulate on top of this kind of wiring).

Actually, most of this house is completely against codes– not just the electric. The plumbing had no vent system, no u-traps or vent for the washing machine… no cold air return vents for the furnace…. fiberglass batting is stuffed in the kitchen cabinets to plug the gaping holes in the walls…. a true DISASTER. You can read some of my past posts about my venture into DIY electrical– what a harrowing ordeal! I have details here and here and here and here is my successful Inspection Day! I passed!

What blows my mind is that all this work was done without any inspection at all, obviously. I know the house is old, but… I’m stunned that all of this stuff was done without the homeowners consulting the codes and building inspectors.

I have had to disconnect a good deal of my electrical system– half the house– because after I saw the condition of the wiring and the way it was installed, I was absolutely terrified. So we are without electricity until I can gut the remainder of the rooms to wire them.

My plea to you homeowners is this: PLEASE get your work inspected. PLEASE resist the urge to slop something together just to “get it done,” and then seal up the walls. Do it the CORRECT way and the SAFE way– for your own sake, but also for the lives of the people who will live in the house after you.

I am on my knees, thanking God I had the foresight to wire the living room with Cat5 ethernet cabling WHILE I gutted the room. Oh my goodness, it has been such a blessing. No more strewn cables across the floor and behind the desks! Hurray! I wasn’t always such a believer in foresight like this, nay!

I’d always read in those home improvement articles to wire everything while the walls are open– even if you don’t have the fancy capacity for it yet. I used to scoff (the eternal penny pincher am I). But I have seen the light. I am doing this from now on. The Cat5 wiring has been such a great thing. It cost me a little extra at the time, and it was tough because my budget was pinched already, but I did it. Yippee! I love it when thngs work out like that.

I just HATE fishing wiring through interior walls of lathe and plaster. I won’t do it anymore. Actually, I still have half a house without electricity because I am waiting until I can gut and restore the walls. It is insane to fish the wiring. If I had the money to invest, maybe I’d just hire a guy to do it… but then again, I’d really rather do it myself, save the money, and gut the room and get new walls.

Of course, not everyone can install wiring and components for audio, video, and Internet. It’s rather complicated. It took me a lot of studying to figure out how to do it. So if you are in need of some nice wiring and just don’t want to do it yourself, hey check out Home Theater San Diego. They are consultants, design experts, and installation experts who can add everything from home audio wiring to home theatre wiring– whether your home is new or already built. Sometimes it’s so good to know someone will handle all the planning and installation, you know what I mean? And these guys can rig everything up with remotes (which is the latest luxury feature becoming more mainstream) to, for example, pipe music throughout the house, and more. Very nice. They work with very high-quality equipment, too. Check out their website or give them a call at 858-324-1704. And check out the FAQ page if you want to learn a thing or two about what’s new in technology and installation.

At DIY Network, they offer cash prizes for everyday folks who have invented cool tools. Some of the tools are indeed very, very cool! This one is one of the best. I couldn’t stop saying “WOW” as I watched the video.

The guy invented a way to twist electrical wires. I wish I had something like ehis last summer, when I wired my living room, upstairs bedroom, and upstairs lights! Oh my gosh, day after day, twisting, twisting, twisting– it’s AGONY. I still hurt, a year later, from all that twisting wire and drilling holes. Every once in a while, my pinched nerve flares up even when doing the simplest things like adjusting the bed frames or sweeping the floor. This tool gets a thumbs up from me!

If you have a cool invention, you can take a video of yourself and upload it to the website. You may find yourself a little richer.

I’ve been on the prowl for cool lighting gadgets ever since I found and bought the Touch&Glow set (I blogged about that here). I am having waaaay too much fun with lighting gadgets. I’m beginning to wonder about myself…

ANYWAY! Who cares! I found ANOTHER really, really cool gadget! This time it was at the Dollar Store. I was shopping for bird seed for our new bird feeder when I saw….. THIS!!!

Oh it doesn’t look like much. Um, actually, there WAS something in there. I took it out. I always do that, darn! I always wind up taking photos of empty boxes. But I am so eager to try the thing out when I get home, I just can’t help myself!

This was $5 at the Dollar Store. Yes! A steal! (The Touch&Glow thing was $15). Of course,this gadget is not as high quality, but it does do the job. I plugged it into my outlet receptacle, and plugged in my lamp. I have a lamp in the Laundry Room because the ceiling fixture doesn’t work. I’m still working on the electric in the house, so we have all these lamps. These gadgets are perfect because 1) I hate touching lamps when my hands are wet, and in the Laundry Room and Kitchen my hands are always wet. 2) The touch-y gadgets are very convenient so we aren’t groping in the dark. 3) We are not wearing out the switches on our lamps anymore, which is a huge plus. Lamps are $25 or more, and I was buying new ones every few months.

OK, so here is the Easy Switch gadget in action.

It is a wireless connection. The package says the components can be as far apart as 60 feet. I installed the switch about three feet from my lamp. (There’s a little hook you screw into the wall, and the switch can be used as a “remote” when you unhook it from the wall hanger). However, I did walk around the house a little, to test out the reception. It does work from long distances! You have to point the remote toward the lamp for it to work best. (And this could be soo much fun, shutting the lights on and off by remote when someone is in the room, heehee).

For $5, you really can’t go wrong. I love this gadget! And now I won’t have to do laundry in the dark!

I just love the Home Inspection Nightmares section at This Old House. Wow. For some reason, looking at these photos makes me feel a whole lot better about my house. I am a little paranoid– I’m afraid the government gestpo will come strorming into my house, throwing me in prison for not having my light switch EXACTLY four feet up from the floor. Then I look at these photos, and waves of euphoric relief wash over me.

Check this out.

Wow.

Just wow.

And this one. Um, what’s the use of having and maintaining gutters of you’re going to do this?!

Oh there are many more goodies at the website. Browsing them is almost as good as browsing I Can Has Cheezburgers!

This photo and this photo courtesy of This Old House.

Have you ever wondered what your computer keyboard looks like inside? I have. Today I decided to open it up and check it out.

It all started when I saw Apple’s new Aluminum Ultra-Thin keyboard. Oh, it’s a beautiful looking thing. I like flat keyboards. Because I sit at a computer all day, I’m quite fussy about my keyboard (and mouse). The Apple is a little beyond my price range ($80 at BestBuy, $50 from Apple) and I’m not sure how it would function with a PC, so I am waiting for a Windows thin keyboard. I’d read that you can take your own keyboard apart and make your own flat one. I don’t necessarily want a flat shell, I want flat keys– that’s why I like the Apple so much– the keys are shaped like Scrabble tiles, only thinner. It’s very nice to use.

Well, all this dwelling on keyboards brought out the screwdriver and camera. We took apart a very old HP keyboard that went to our Windows ME we got almost ten years ago now. My, how time flies!

Inside the plastic shell are three layers of plastic. Two of the layers are very thin sheets. The top protective layer rests on top of the key matrix, which has small gold dots and lines. The electronc pulses course through the lines and dots. They are activated when you press down the keys.

Behind all this is a thicker layer of rubbery plastic with small plastic pads. The pads are directly correlated to the keys above and the gold dots on the key matrix. This kind of HP keyboard is a rubber dome switch kind. It resembles bubble wrap, in a way, but the plastic is more rubbery and the little domes are firmer. When you press on a key while typing, a small mechanism pushes these little rubber domes down. It works as a plunger to touch the point on the key matrix layer. Your computer registers it all as letters, numbers, and symbols. Pretty amazing, huh?

Some geeks have used only the key matrix as their keyboard. They keep the circuitry intact (I dismantled mine, so that I could see it all in pieces). Then they plug in their flat keyboard and press the gold dots with their fingertips.

I can’t see how a homemade flat keyboard would be very comfortable. I don’t mind the shell, it’s the shape and size of the actual keys that matter to me. But after this, my curiosity was sated! Cool, huh?

The electricity in this house continues to drive me crazy! I just can’t figure it out.

Half the electricity in the house is still out. I have been very slowly redoing what I can. But we still have only a cobbed-together kitchen light with two outlets. We are still without lights in the Front Entry, the Dining Room, the Laundry Room, the Breakfast Room, the upstairs Hallway, the upstairs Bathroom, and one of the bedrooms that we call the “Spare Oom.” So far, the only new circuitry I have put in are the Living Room, the girls’ Bedroom, the Master Bedroom, and the boys’ bedroom.

For the sake of brevity, I shall quickly explain my goal: in order to get lights for our Dining Room, I have to do the Front Entry first. And in order to do the Front Entry, I have to do the Upstairs Hallway. The switches I want for these rooms are all near each other, and the holes in the plaster walls are all open to accomodate the new lines.

So, I decide today that I am going to put a switched light in our upstairs Hallway. I remove the old fixture and test the wires (as I always do) to make sure there is absolutely no voltage surging through the wires. I am devastated to discover a mass of tangled wires behind the fixture, and some wires are still live. ??? Wha? I had shut off and removed this circuit a month ago. It should have no voltage!!

I suspect that the original installers used lighting fixtures as extra junction boxes. I am no master of electricity, so I don’t even know if this is possible. But this one fixture has three cables attached to it… I completely disengaged the switches for this Hallway fixture long ago. They were on Circuit #18. This circuit is gone– removed from the service panel! So I open up the fixture and find energy… I try to see where this fixture wiring is getting its energy, and when I shut off Circuit #15– the kitchen light with two outlets–one wire from the fixture wiring goes dead (but the third cable still has power from another place). So… this Hallway light was originally being fed from two or three circuits??? (Circuits #18 and 15 and something else?) Can this be? Or could the switches have been on one circuit and the light fixture on another circuit?

Whatever the case, I have absolutely no control over the old electric in this house, and it makes me terribly jittery. How can I disengage a fixture’s wiring if I don’t know where it is coming from and to where the electricity continues? (we have found junction boxes in the walls and ceilings and this kind of circuitry may be no different). And what if I disengage it anyway only to discover that I have disconnected a connection that makes the meager remainder of the house electrified (as what happened with my mouse-chewed wire)? It seems that the electric in this house is not in “sections” as is standard practice now (a feed cable running from the service panel out to sections of the house), but rather is in a loop (a “feed” wire running through all sorts of places, electrifying anything and everything it goes through, and then back to all sorts of other places in a “neutral” loop. It is crazy and how can I replace this kind of wiring without losing everything beyond it in the looped circuit???

Since I can’t afford to lose the small amount of electricity I have left in the Kitchen, I have chosen to leave everything alone until I can redo the wiring in one big sweep. And that means tearing down ceilings and some walls.

ARG!

Today I finished wiring the telephone and ethernet jacks. It was a long, loopy process. Yesterday, I discovered that I had run out of POT wiring (Plain Old Telephone wiring– the typical old red, green, yellow, and black stuff) and attempted to just use a regular 25′ telephone cord with the heads chopped off. We’ve used it before and it has worked fine. But I couldn’t use this stuff. The strands of wiring inside the cord are thinner than hair, and they kept splintering and breaking. To top it off, our old phone terminal (the connection box where the service lines from the telephone company come in the basement and are attached) is old and has no cover. And it is a PAIN to use (if you want to add a new phone line, you have to disconnect all existing lines and hopefully reinstall them all wound around the bolt together). I tried to replace it with a NYNEX box the telephone repairman had used for an old business phone here (long ago). I couldn’t figure out how to use it! Arg! I was going beserk with frustration trying to “make do” with faulty stuff.

So I went to Home Depot to look for a new terminal and to get some POT. LOL, that sounds funny. Well, we searched high and low and could find no POT wiring. The guy there cut me some 18AWG speaker wire, thinking that would work. I got home and opened the wiring to discover that it is just too big and too cumbersome to try to run up through the openings.

Well, I did some heavy-duty research online and learned that the POT wiring is slowly being “sunsetted.” That is, it is not going to be on the store shelves very much anymore, because there is a new kid on the block: Category 3 wiring. Cat3, for short. I bought some and have found it to be a delight to work with. I did not find any phone terminal boxes, unfortunately. I actually can’t find them any anywhere. Weird. Do only phone companies provide them?

Well, since I already have my Living Room walls up, I had to fish this new telephone wiring through. It wasn’t too bad. I am used to fishing lines through walls around here. Let me say that it is sooooo much easier to fish wires through sheetrock walls!

I only had to fish one Cat3 wire through, even though I am going to have two telephone lines at this area. Cat3 has 6 wires in its sheath. You can see in the blurry photo below (sorry) that I wired two jacks with one cable. I am using orange and green for my POT “red”/”green” connection (with that old terminal) in the basement. (The terminal doesn’t care what color wire it gets, just as long as the wires makes a continous loop). For the other jack, I wired the Cat3 white/orange wire as my “red,” and the Cat3 blue as the “green.” The other two wires I tucked back. Maybe someday they will come in handy.

They say the quality is better using Cat3, too, since the wires are better insulated and twisted together to prevent interference on the phone line. Since I will be plugging my DSL modem into this telephone jack, I chose to make the line as good as possible to improve my DSL speed.

Category5 cables are used for ethernet lines. I wired an ethernet jack for all four walls in the Living Room, since this is where we homeschool and do office work. I have no fancy home network wiring panel… not yet anyway. I just rigged up the ethernet jacks to connect to the DSL modem that I will have at my “work station” (i.e., my desk). This is so that our computers can connect to the modem without having 100′ ethernet cables strung all over the floor and across walls.

Below are two shots of the ethernet wiring. You can see that the wires are color-coded. You just install the correct wires into the color-coded ethernet jacks (called RJ45). The jacks give you an option of using a wire pattern A or B. I chose A. The key is not which pattern is correct, but to pick a pattern and use it for everything. If you choose A for some and B for others, your network will not work.

After punching in those wires, I snipped the ends off and put on the little cover for the jack. It is amazingly easy. I hope it works! Since I have no modem in there yet, I can’t test the system. But it is an easy job, if a bit tedious. The colorful combinations keep it lively, however.

This is the finished project for the connections at the work station.

I left one blank for future use, if necessary. The top two jacks are RJ11– my two telephone lines. The remaining jacks are for ethernet. The DSL modem cables will plug into these. These jacks hold cables that run out under the room in a “star formation.” Our computers at the other ends of the room will plug into their corresponding jacks. They will be able to connect to our DSL modem through these wall jacks, rather than stringing cables all over the room. Eventually, it would be neat to build a whole home networking panel, but I am not interested in that right now. Gotta get the basics done around here, first!

P.S. If you are looking for a little help or just more info about telephone and data wiring, I found a few sites to be very helpful.

Expert Village How-To Video

Structured Wiring How-To

How To Wire Phone Jacks

I think the hardest part for me was understanding how the system works. This is not hard, I just didn’t know how the system works! Once I figured that out, installing everything was very easy.