On becoming an electrician

Hatorade

A nice asshole.
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Had my first…”go check
this out and fix it if you can” moment today. Arrived to picture below. Garage wiring 3 circuits, nothing hooked up and no home run I could find. Should have it sorted by tomorrow but what a cluster, nothing labeled, mix of 12 and 10 gauge wire, 3/4 and 1/2 inch conduit ran with a bunch of J and pull boxes. Will get more pictures later.

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Kajiimagi

<Aristocrat╭ರ_•́>
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Had my first…”go check
this out and fix it if you can” moment today. Arrived to picture below. Garage wiring 3 circuits, nothing hooked up and no home run I could find. Should have it sorted by tomorrow but what a cluster, nothing labeled, mix of 12 and 10 gauge wire, 3/4 and 1/2 inch conduit ran with a bunch of J and pull boxes. Will get more pictures later.

View attachment 605800
Is purple a common phase conductor color where you are? Or is this a case of 'lectricty be color blind yo' ? Also I fucking HATE stranded wire in small sizes. I guess now in the turn it off first era it would not be so bad but when you worked that shit hot the 1st thing it did was flap around and hit your hand. Found the hot wire real fast though.
 
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Hatorade

A nice asshole.
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Is purple a common phase conductor color where you are? Or is this a case of 'lectricty be color blind yo' ? Also I fucking HATE stranded wire in small sizes. I guess now in the turn it off first era it would not be so bad but when you worked that shit hot the 1st thing it did was flap around and hit your hand. Found the hot wire real fast though.
Yes, brown purple yellow is what we use in this part of texas.
Got it sorted, once I figured out what was what I found a missing neutral and I indeed did need to run the home run. The roof made bending the last bit of conduit interesting. Had a visitor when I opened the garage door as well.
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Kajiimagi

<Aristocrat╭ರ_•́>
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Yes, brown purple yellow is what we use in this part of texas.
Got it sorted, once I figured out what was what I found a missing neutral and I indeed did need to run the home run. The roof made bending the last bit of conduit interesting. Had a visitor when I opened the garage door as well.
View attachment 605902View attachment 605903
480/277V? Everywhere I worked it was BOY (Brown Orange Yellow)
 

TheBeagle

JunkiesNetwork Donor
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know supposed to be more serious here, but who needs safety with cat like reflexes


That happened to me when I was in my 20's building steel buildings. It was like 4 of us guys from high school, one of which had his dad stake him to start up the business. We did a lot of wild, you're not supposed to be doing it like that type of shit. Anyway, we built a scaffold out of 1" square tubing and plywood with some wheels on the bottom of the legs to roll around the foundation on. It was nice and sturdy at its lowest height, 6'. But if we built a taller building we would raise it up and throw some self tapping screws in the legs to keep it that height. (1" square tubing sliding up and down inside another piece of 1 1/4"). Well after a couple years those legs had dozens of holes in them and we were doing a mo ster building with 14' sidewalls. Had that shitass little scaffold maxxed out at 12' and I'm rolling around fixing the seams of the roll on insulation in this job and one of the wheels gets a pebble under it, stops, but the momentum of me and the rest of the thing kept going so that leg of the scaffold bent and then gave out. I rode that mother fucker down with my ass on the side of the plywood platform which took the brunt of the fall. Stuck the landing, calmy walked away, and we went and bought some proper yellow scaffolding that afternoon, lol.
 
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Goatface

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while silly, i didn't know about the running bathrooms off 1 gfci outlet. they also talk about knob and tube wiring, and getting shocked



guy in camo hat and tats, goes by fat electrician, used to be a commercial electrician
bald guy with drill instructor hat under pink light, goes by angry cops, he has series called this old crack house
black shirt/black hat goes by habitual linecrosser, used to be in air defense
the last guy is eli
 

Kajiimagi

<Aristocrat╭ರ_•́>
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while silly, i didn't know about the running bathrooms off 1 gfci outlet. they also talk about knob and tube wiring, and getting shocked



guy in camo hat and tats, goes by fat electrician, used to be a commercial electrician
bald guy with drill instructor hat under pink light, goes by angry cops, he has series called this old crack house
black shirt/black hat goes by habitual linecrosser, used to be in air defense
the last guy is eli

Point of fact here (akchully) , when GFCI's first came out it was perfectly legal to run all the bathrooms AND the outside outlets on 1 gfci outlet/breaker because of cost. Guy in Myrtle Beach tells me he has an electrical problem at his house that he cannot solve. He's converted his back deck to a home office and when he would turn his PC on the breaker would trip. I go to his house and that's exactly what he had. He asked me what was wrong and I said 'nothing, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to'. Old PC power supplies bled on the neutral (white) wire so much it would trip a GFCI , not sure if they still do. He asked me how to fix it and I wouldn't tell him , I fixed it myself so he didn't jerry rig it. All bathrooms and both outside outlets were on 1 gfci breaker. I changed the breaker to a regular breaker and installed GFCI's in both bathrooms.

You get into an older house you inherit older codes. AFCI's are the new problem. Not sure if they ever got all the bugs on them figured out. When I moved into the house I am in now I removed all the AFCI breakers immediately.

Helped another guy (that was also supposed to be an electrician) renovate his house in Albemarle NC (famous for Kelly Pickler) that had knob & tube wiring and he wanted to keep it. I flat out refused to do anything except rip it out. All that looked like to me was a great way to start a fire.
 
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BrutulTM

Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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Yeah, even if you think knob and tube was an awesome idea, if you see it that means your wiring is 50+ years old and that alone is probably a pretty good reason to replace it.
 

Fucker

Log Wizard
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Yeah, even if you think knob and tube was an awesome idea, if you see it that means your wiring is 50+ years old and that alone is probably a pretty good reason to replace it.
It might not be that old. My parents installed it in my room when I was a toddler.