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[triennial - points]
Tenant called to let us know power was out in a couple of upstairs townhouse bedrooms, upstairs hallway, & ceiling fan in master bedroom. I assumed it was some problem I created last year when I rewired the upstairs hallway light over the stairs. That was after a prior tenant had taken down the light over the stairs with the idea in mind of putting a fan there instead, but moved out of the area leaving me facing an open junction box with wires dangling down.
All power had been OK till tenant's mom, helping out, was running the vacuum cleaner upstairs. Tenant smelled something burning. Tenant's mom turned off vacuum & disconnected it from the wall. After that, no power where the vacuum had been plugged in & no power in those other upstairs receptacles & fixtures. No breakers or GFCIs were tripped. Vacuum cleaner works OK when connected to other receptacles that still have power.
Chief Of Staff & I went over to check things out, looking for burn smudges on receptacles. Did not see any. Didn't see any burnt wires inside half-dozen or so wall plugs & switches I opened up looking for something obvious, like a burnt or broken wire or terminal. Time to call in the professionals.
Licensed electrician from Craig's List showed up, checked all the breakers & GFCIs, rechecked all the receptacles & switches I checked, finding nothing out of order. I said I was semi-fearful I'd goofed something up when I re-did the ceiling fixture over the stairs, which I'd fixed by removing the box entirely, remounting it away from the hole, adding a box extension with lots of room for all the connections, reconnected the existing wires, & added 1 new wire. The new wire goes to a new ceiling box mounted securely in the old box hole, making it easy to connect the new light fixture with just black & white & ground wires in that box rather than the whole tangle & gaggle of wires contained in the box formerly mounted in that hole but now relocated & extended up in the attic crawl space. All that was OK, according to the electrician. (I didn't re-check that attic-box myself. When I was up there doing that work last year, I torqued my back so bad that I ran up $500 in bills for back pain treatment. I was willing to pay an electrical professional this time so that I wouldn't risk having to pay a medical professional -- again.)
Next the electrician opened up more switches & receptacles, beyond those I'd opened up & reclosed the day before. Nothing.
Eventually the over-stairs hallway light flickered on & I knew the electricity pro had solved the mystery. What caused the problem was a high-tech in-wall fan control that the tenant's significant other had installed to control the new, high-end ceiling fan (with light) which replaced the pull-chain special that was in there when we rented them the townhouse. The high-tech wall-mounted fan control was rated 300W. It was rigged up so that it carried the whole 15A lighting circuit. The burning odor our tenant smelled was the scent of the high-tech fan control frying when her mom was running the 6A vacuum cleaner in another bedroom on the same circuit.
In retrospect, I should have caught on that what looked like a regular (if high-tech) fan switch was not so much a fancy switch as an FCC-approved high-tech, multi-speed, wall-mounted remote control for the fan. That is, the old wall flip-switch in the bedroom never controlled the old pull-chain fan or pull-chain fan light -- that's why the old fan had to have pull chains. The bedroom wall switch originally controlled a wall receptacle. Power up in the ceiling -- added after the townhouse was built but before we bought it (via VA foreclosure, but that's another story) was unswitched -- always on, powered (although I didn't know it at the time) by 1 of the wires in that tangled gaggle I rewired up in the attic crawl space. The room was not wired right for installation of the tenant's high-tech wall-mounted remote fan control. When that high-tech control was hooked up anyway, it worked the fan OK but it was connected so that it had that 1 whole upstairs circuit going through it -- 15A through a 300W device Sheesh.
The only reason it all worked for 10 months or so is that the tenant never had anything turned on drawing all that much power -- not until that episode with her mom & the vacuum cleaner. Tenant always plugged in the vacuum cleaner over inside the bathroom, on a separate GFCI circuit. Her mom plugged it into the circuit that nobody realized was miswired through the fancypants 300W fan control.
To the tenant I said, "Hey, you can call up your mom & say, 'Mom ! You fried my fan control ! ' "
Shocked & aghast, she said, "I'm not going to tell her that ! "
"I didn't think you would," I said. "I'm just making trouble."
I should have realized that the fancy high-tech fan control was suspect, but in full doofus mode I forgot that the original fan was a no-switch pull-chain special -- that it had to be that way because the room wasn't wired for a wall-controlled ceiling fan, with or without light kit.
At least the attic rewiring I did last year was OK -- & found to be so by the professional electrician. And at least my back this time is untorqued & free of pain.
Real estate investment is OK, I suppose, but episodes like this remind me that I've got my investment strategy all backward. I'm not supposed to be working for my money. My money is supposed to be working for me. That is to say, even if I am not a complete electrical doofus, I am still a board-certified financial doofus.
So it goes.
All power had been OK till tenant's mom, helping out, was running the vacuum cleaner upstairs. Tenant smelled something burning. Tenant's mom turned off vacuum & disconnected it from the wall. After that, no power where the vacuum had been plugged in & no power in those other upstairs receptacles & fixtures. No breakers or GFCIs were tripped. Vacuum cleaner works OK when connected to other receptacles that still have power.
Chief Of Staff & I went over to check things out, looking for burn smudges on receptacles. Did not see any. Didn't see any burnt wires inside half-dozen or so wall plugs & switches I opened up looking for something obvious, like a burnt or broken wire or terminal. Time to call in the professionals.
Licensed electrician from Craig's List showed up, checked all the breakers & GFCIs, rechecked all the receptacles & switches I checked, finding nothing out of order. I said I was semi-fearful I'd goofed something up when I re-did the ceiling fixture over the stairs, which I'd fixed by removing the box entirely, remounting it away from the hole, adding a box extension with lots of room for all the connections, reconnected the existing wires, & added 1 new wire. The new wire goes to a new ceiling box mounted securely in the old box hole, making it easy to connect the new light fixture with just black & white & ground wires in that box rather than the whole tangle & gaggle of wires contained in the box formerly mounted in that hole but now relocated & extended up in the attic crawl space. All that was OK, according to the electrician. (I didn't re-check that attic-box myself. When I was up there doing that work last year, I torqued my back so bad that I ran up $500 in bills for back pain treatment. I was willing to pay an electrical professional this time so that I wouldn't risk having to pay a medical professional -- again.)
Next the electrician opened up more switches & receptacles, beyond those I'd opened up & reclosed the day before. Nothing.
Eventually the over-stairs hallway light flickered on & I knew the electricity pro had solved the mystery. What caused the problem was a high-tech in-wall fan control that the tenant's significant other had installed to control the new, high-end ceiling fan (with light) which replaced the pull-chain special that was in there when we rented them the townhouse. The high-tech wall-mounted fan control was rated 300W. It was rigged up so that it carried the whole 15A lighting circuit. The burning odor our tenant smelled was the scent of the high-tech fan control frying when her mom was running the 6A vacuum cleaner in another bedroom on the same circuit.
In retrospect, I should have caught on that what looked like a regular (if high-tech) fan switch was not so much a fancy switch as an FCC-approved high-tech, multi-speed, wall-mounted remote control for the fan. That is, the old wall flip-switch in the bedroom never controlled the old pull-chain fan or pull-chain fan light -- that's why the old fan had to have pull chains. The bedroom wall switch originally controlled a wall receptacle. Power up in the ceiling -- added after the townhouse was built but before we bought it (via VA foreclosure, but that's another story) was unswitched -- always on, powered (although I didn't know it at the time) by 1 of the wires in that tangled gaggle I rewired up in the attic crawl space. The room was not wired right for installation of the tenant's high-tech wall-mounted remote fan control. When that high-tech control was hooked up anyway, it worked the fan OK but it was connected so that it had that 1 whole upstairs circuit going through it -- 15A through a 300W device Sheesh.
The only reason it all worked for 10 months or so is that the tenant never had anything turned on drawing all that much power -- not until that episode with her mom & the vacuum cleaner. Tenant always plugged in the vacuum cleaner over inside the bathroom, on a separate GFCI circuit. Her mom plugged it into the circuit that nobody realized was miswired through the fancypants 300W fan control.
To the tenant I said, "Hey, you can call up your mom & say, 'Mom ! You fried my fan control ! ' "
Shocked & aghast, she said, "I'm not going to tell her that ! "
"I didn't think you would," I said. "I'm just making trouble."
I should have realized that the fancy high-tech fan control was suspect, but in full doofus mode I forgot that the original fan was a no-switch pull-chain special -- that it had to be that way because the room wasn't wired for a wall-controlled ceiling fan, with or without light kit.
At least the attic rewiring I did last year was OK -- & found to be so by the professional electrician. And at least my back this time is untorqued & free of pain.
Real estate investment is OK, I suppose, but episodes like this remind me that I've got my investment strategy all backward. I'm not supposed to be working for my money. My money is supposed to be working for me. That is to say, even if I am not a complete electrical doofus, I am still a board-certified financial doofus.
So it goes.
-- Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.
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