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.

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.

When we gutted the living room, money was really tight. (It’s always tight, though). Yet, I gritted my teeth and decided to shell out the additional $70 to buy materials for Cat5 installation. Cat5 is wiring for ethernet– DSL internet. Previously, we simply had long ropes of ethernet cables strewn across the living room from the DSL router to each computer. I tried to hide them, of course, but they still looked awful, like a big black spider web of cables. And in some cases, I couldn’t use Cat5 for a computer because I couldn’t string cable across a doorway. I’d use wireless for the computer, but if we use the cordless telephone in the living room, that computer would lose it’s connection. Grr.

So… back to gutting the living room. OK. We pulled out the walls and some of the noggin (bricks between the studs, my post about it is here). I installed electrical wiring, telephone wiring, and ethernet Cat5 wiring (my posts where I blogged about it are here). Here are a few visual aids:

Learning HOW to install it was harder than the actual install. That took some time. When I felt confident enough, I made a total of four connections for the living room (we use four computers for our homeschool lessons)

This is the finished project for the connections at the work station. At each computer work station, there are more modems, ready for Cat5 ethernet cables to be plugged in.

Well, anyway, today the kids and I moved the furniture (well, they moved it) and we dusted and organized the room to prepare for school lessons. And we also shifted the computers around. I had to unplug all the cables and create new workstations. And BOY OH BOY am I thankful I didn’t have to lace ethernet cables all across the floors and walls this year!! I am slapping myself on the back for it. I am SO glad I paid that $70 for the wiring and installed it.

Moral of the story– it is true, it’s better to do everything you can while the walls are open rather than regret missing the opportunity later. I am so elated that I did something right this time, lol!

The last time “he” was here was July 2007, when my living room looked like this:

Today the room looks like this:

“He” is the electrical inspector and he visited my humble abode Monday! (OK, so my living room still needs work and a good deal of decor, but at least the walls are closed!).

I took him around the room and then to the basement. I showed him my work and we discussed my methodology.

Here is a photo of my circuit panel. Isn’t it beautiful?!

I’ve been very conscientious about labeling EVERYTHING. I tend to forget things, you see. I even labeled each feed wire with a description of the room and the circuit breaker number. This impressed the inspector.

I even label the junction boxes with the circuit breaker number, and label the wires, as well. I will eventually be adding a few more circuits to this box, so I need to have everything labeled to avoid confusion.

I follow the codes stringently, and I keep my electrical work very simple and straightforward. For example, some electricians split their circuits using 12-3 wire, to save space and wire. I use straight-forward 12-2 wire and follow direct lines, even though this means a little extra work and extra wire. Actually, I don’t split circuits because I am not that confident in my abilities. The inspector said my methodology will actually work out to my advantage, because soon the town will be following the 2008 National Electrician’s Code (right now they go by the 2005). The 2008 requires Arc-Fault Circuit Interrupters for all receptacles except the GFCI. The AFCIs are very touchy with 12-3 split circuitry (they flip off easily and it is very inconvenient). Read more about it here and here and here. It’s interesting reading. I’m not sold on AFCIs and will not install them unless I have to, to meet regulations. But thank God I am seeing some benefit to taking the straightforward route, as well as the “more is better” route. I use 12-gauge wire and 20 amp breakers only, so I’ve “futurized” the electrical system.

This is the reward I got for my job:

Wooo! Can you feel me beaming?? I am so happy to have everything “official.” Next in line is the kitchen. That room is a DISASTER. Some people are puzzled why I am so interested in electricity and not “girlie” stuff like plus size lingerie. :-p

There is something wonderful about studying and working very hard on something very difficult, and seeing that project accomplished. PLUS, it’s terrific saving all this money! I had a quote of $2000 from some electricians to wire my living room. Yet I spent about $200 for all the supplies, and I wired both the living room and the bedroom upstairs. I also was able to add a few worklights just where I like them in the basement, and wire up my washing machine on its own circuit. The possibilities are endless now!

Did you know that the phrase “by the skin of my teeth” comes from the Bible book of Job?

Just an interesting fact.

I’ve slowed down my renovations to a mere crawl these days. We are just too busy with school and fall/winter preparations right now. It has been…uh, interesting, using the fixtures on electrical system I installed. Nothing goes wrong, it is just me. I still remain jumpy when a light bulb goes out (oh no! did I wire it wrong?) or an appliance malfunctions (oh no! will it explode into a fireball?), but everything is really working as it should (no sparks, no flames, etc). So far.

Uncannily, we had a power surge during a horrific thunderstorm a few weeks ago. PEOPLE, BUY A SURGE PROTECTOR FOR YOUR COMPUTERS! During the storm, we heard this eerie, cackling zap throughout the house. Right after that, my daughter called me to the computers (which were on during the storm) as they mysteriously rebooted themselves and started spewing screwy BIOS information. Gulp. I shut off the power to the computers, restarted them, and, thank God, they seem to have recovered. I shudder to think of what might have happened had I no surge protectors. The rest of the electrical system here seemed OK (except for the digital timer on my coffeepot, which flashed Chinese numerals until I reset it). But it was a fright, to be sure. I also wonder if part of the problem was that the computers had not been plugged in to a grounded outlet area (the part of the house with the very old wiring). The next day we moved the computers to the part of the house that I had redone with proper, grounded wiring.

Other good news is that we finally got the thermostat for the furnace installed! On October 22nd (Monday)! Believe me, waiting that long to finalize the heating system in Upstate NY is risky. But the weather has been incredibly balmy in Upstate all month. No frost yet! Our frost date is usually about September 25th or so. I expect the weather to change at any time, however.

The problem with the thermostat was that… well, let me go back a little. Earlier in the summer I had removed it along with everything else when I gutted the Living Room. The thermostat wire had been plastered into the wall at some point when that part of the wall had been patched long ago. Needless to say I had to pry the very old and decrepit wire out of ancient, hardened joint compound, and the thermostat wasn’t too happy to move, either.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take a close look at how the thermostat was installed before I removed it. Oops.

So months flew by as we demolished, hacked, electrified, insulated, hammered, nailed, painted the room etc. Now I will say that I did have enough foresight in getting the proper wiring, placing it inside the wall, etc. Everything was set to install the thermostat until when it actually came time to do so. I just couldn’t figure out where to put the wires and where to place the screws. I didn’t remember how it looked when I had removed the thermostat….

I searched the internet for instructions and the most detailed I could find said, “For wiring instructions, see your installer.” Sigh. I have a great Furnace Guy, but this is peak season for him and not only was he hard to reach (I’d tried calling him a dozen times for advice but he was crazily busy) but I didn’t want to pay for a service call. My husband decided to tackle the thing. He studied the thermostat for a while and tried screwing in a few wires. I, in the basement, flipped the switch to see how it would go. Nothing. My husband tried moving some wires around, try that. Nothing. We were baffled. I was going to have to petition my Furnace Guy. Winter was coming and this fluky warm weather wouldn’t wait for us.

After two weeks of phone tag, my FG popped by. He took a long look at the thermostat and my husband’s wiring job. He scratched his head and asked, “And it doesn’t work?” He wondered if something was wrong with our furnace– that $4,000 furnace we got last year– brand new– after the flood–and whose warranty had just expired a week ago– that furnace. Gulp.

We double-checked everything: the circuit breaker (even though I had never removed the furnace circuit when I’d done the panel work), the wires, the junction boxes, the connections… time was ebbing away and my FG had to go soon. He tested the furnace’s electrical panel (with some very cool voltmeters!) when he suddenly said “aha!” He pulled out this tiny purple thing from the panel and tested it. It was the fuse to the furnace. Remember that power surge we’d had? It had blown out the fuse to the furnace. My FG said fuses are a great safety feature, because that tiny fuse absorbs excess electricity should any flow. If anything were to get by that fuse and zap the electrical panel, it would cost hundreds of dollars to replace. So that tiny little purple thing saved my new furnace. Neat.

The FG had an extra fuse on hand, he plugged it in the little slot, and voila! The furnace kicked in and started running! Not only was I thrilled that the thermostat finally worked, I was thrilled that my wiring work over the summer and my husband’s installation of the thermostat worked! Wow was I happy!

To put the icing on the cake, my FG said there was no charge for the service, not even for the cost of the fuse. What a guy! I paid him with a big bag of garden tomatoes and that seemed to make him happier than if I’d written a check.

Well, now we are really ready for winter. And given the weather forecast for the week, we did by the skin of our teeth.

There was a short story read to me in school as a kid, that I remember from time to time, particularly at the change of seasons here in NY. When summer’s languid heat begins to fade and autumn’s crispy winds begin to blow, I very often remember the story. It is Aesop’s fable, The Grasshopper and the Ant.

The Ant works hard in the heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed. The Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he either dies out in the cold, or [in various renditions of the story] begs and receives humiliating charity from the ant he teased.

(And here‘s a politicized version that is kinda humorous.)

Even as a kid, I was always a bit of an Energizer Bunny. I always found projects to work on. I also sometimes grew uneasy at winter’s approach, as if I wouldn’t be sufficiently ready for this hibernating season of shorter days, central heating, processed foods, and round-the-clock indoor living. I am feeling a little like this these days.

Many of my projects are still undone. I have electrical wire hanging out from holes, waiting to be connected or extensions to be fished through walls. My French door– the only buffer between the very cold Front Entry and the Living Room– is off it’s frame and waiting to be hung again. The kids are still in their summer clothes, and have their lists of clothing needs. Plus, I don’t even have my thermostat installed yet!

Worse, my energy seems to have dissipated, of late. I’ve been a little under the weather, and I strained my shoulder and knee. I’m hoping this is just a momentary lapse, that soon I will be back in action to batten down the hatches before the snow starts flying!

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.

Things are really starting to roll now. Thursday, the electrical inspector said that everything looks very good, and that day I installed fiberglass batt insulation and the vapor barrier.

The next day, we rented a sheetrock lift and installed the ceiling drywall. My husband did most of the work– and what a job that was! Our ceilings are over 9 feet high; we were up until 1:30am to finish the job!

I haven’t done too much with the electrical. My arms and hands have been so sore that they are swollen and the veins are showing through! Yuk! The carpal tunnel gets unbearable at times. This explains why I haven’t blogged much, even though I have had lots to blog about. I am taking it easy this week and focusing on getting the Living Room done. My full-time rewiring projects will continue after we finish that.

Yet I did spend a little time today making a new circuit for the washing machine. I’d discovered that the wiring was 14/2 gauge (a lightweight gauge meant for lighting fixtures, not appliances) with a 15 amp outlet. My computers, television, refrigerator, kitchen outlets, porch lights, and DSL modem were all on that same circuit. It took some time to rip out the old washing machine outlet (I dated it to the 1940s, judging by the old powder-blue paint all over it), but snaking it down to the basement and stapling the line to joists and to the circuit breaker panel was a piece of cake. I am very comfortable working in the circuit panel now, and I actually like it! I like to organize, and my panel shows it. I hope the next owners of the house appreciate all my hard work!

The girls have been working on their own projects, too. I showed them how to repair plaster walls with sheetrock. Their bedroom walls have a dozen big holes punched in them, from the electrical work we’ve done in there. They are doing a very good job with the repairs, and becoming quite proficient with the tools.

Things are rolling right along. My husband is going to handle the bulk of the sheetrock installation, which is a big relief for me. He is elated that I will spackle the seams and he won’t have to! I now know why some people hire out the drywall installation… ugh. But for us, this endeavor is 100% sweat equity.