Electrical(WorkDate: 2005-12-26, WebpageDate: 2006-02-25)

We started working on electrical sometime mid December. This was the second of the two main goals for this remodel project - replacing all the old crappy electrical with modern, safe, reliable stuff. This meant we got to wire 5 new circuits from scratch! We installed two 240v heaters for a total of 3500 watts of heating, six light sockets and associated switches, 12 (?) outlets 4 of which were GCFIs, and 500-600 feet of wire. We also replaced two circuit breakers with double circuit breakers (converting 2 slots into 4) doing fairly significant wiring work in our breaker box - don't touch those 240v trunk lines!

In the previous two web-pages (rafters and center-beam) you'll see lots of pictures of the various wiring we did. Here are a few more. Below are two of the more complicated electrical boxes we wired:

By mid January we were ready to be inspected. The inspector was very nice (and surprisingly arrived the next day after we requested an inspection even though we scheduled it for several days later). However, we didn't pass. There was a little bit of grounding that wasn't right (easy). Our removal of the old, disconnected wiring wasn't done right (easy). The junction boxes under the floor needed to be moved down below where the insulation would go so they would be exposed (work, but not too much). The big problem, though, was we ran all the cables from the kitchen to our breaker box in a large PVC pipe. We thought this was to code. It was a royal pain to do and... it all had to go. We had to extract all the cables from all the PVC pipe (with many 90degree elbows) and run the wire again, outside any tubing - which incidentally was easier than running it through the PVC tubing in the first place. Any, we did it. At the beginning of February we got inspected again and passed!!!

It was so exciting to turn on the electrical for the first time. Everything worked just right! We must have known what we were doing (we did do a lot of reading on the subject so one would hope we did...). Below are some pictures after we covered things up and turned things on.

This pair of dimmers (above) are the same box as the left-picture of the exposed boxes above.

We now have a front-light (below)! We put in a nice 20w fluorescent bulb (equivalent to a 75w incandescent). It lights up the front of the house great and now we don't need the monstrous energy sucking street-light the previous owners had used.

Below is the north wall in the kitchen with 3 power outlets. You'll notice we haven't wired the phone jack yet.