My house was wired by idiots
We’ve made a lot of progress on the attic, and I’ll have pics/video up of that someday soon. But last night I realized that my house’s original wiring was done by a bunch of cavemen with brain damage, most likely self inflicted.
My dad was upstairs putting primer on the walls when I got home, and I helped him out with patching up some other areas to ready the last walls that we can paint right now. After we were all done and cleaned up the painting stuff, I tried to turn on the kitchen light and it didn’t come on. I then tried the dining room light and that didn’t work either. I went down into the basement to look at the breakers - none of them were flipped. We tried flipping them all anyways since we never got them marked, and no joy. FUCK!
I looked around and tried turning on a light bulb near the dryer to look at some of the wires - this particular bulb doesn’t have a switch, and I have to unscrew it to turn it off. Thankfully it’s a CFL so it doesn’t get very hot. Anyways, this fucker didn’t work EITHER! At this point I have no idea what the hell is going on. Then I found some box with one of those old glass fuses and a switch with On/Off. I traced the wire, and from what I could tell it fed into the light bulb, so I figured this must be it. In the pouring rain I drove over to Valu Home Center to inevitably waste $5.29 plug gas money on 30 Amp Time Delay fuses. Why’s that?
Because when I got home and plugged it in, the lights still didn’t work. Wonderful, because it’s always fun to pay money to renovate your attic, put a new roof on your house and new doors, and then just for kicks call an electrician!
Then I go over to the light near the dryer and fiddle around with it, and lo and behold the damn thing turns on, and then goes out. I screwed it in a little tighter and -viola!- it comes right on! Then I heard some weird noise, something like “pssshhh….whurra whurra whurra”. I go upstairs, and not only are the lights on, but the dishwasher is now running about halfway through it’s cycle.
So what happened?
Well, I can tell you it wasn’t the light bulb, because unscrewing it before never turned out those lights. To give you a bit of background, our upstairs is totally rewired, but some of the downstairs stuff, especially the basement fixtures and lights, are still the old Knob and Tube wiring. Not so much porcelain knobs, but that old ass wire. What happened was that the old owner’s electrician decided that it would be a great idea to use old wire with new junction boxes. It was also a fan-fucking-tastic idea, apparently, to create a light fixture out of a junction box.
How do you do this, you ask? Well, there’s some attachment that goes into this junction box that you’re able to screw a light bulb into. When this attachment is unscrewed, the circuit is broken. This is why the light bulb doesn’t have a switch because it’s fed into the junction, and it’s HOT 24-FUCKING-7. Every time I unscrewed the light bulb, I loosened this attachment a little bit until it wasn’t making contact any longer. Yes, a fantastic idea. Don’t make a separate light fixture, just make one out of a junction box!
I can’t wait until we redo the rest of this wiring. I shudder to think of the other houses on the block, because I’m not quite sure they even have updated wiring and they’ll probably catch on fire one day, all at the same time.
