Tuesday, March 9, 2010

breaker breaker

After gutting the basement I really haven't updated things associated with that whole process.  Many little things had to be done to get everything out properly.  One of those things was some wiring.  To make things easy during the demo process I just shut off all the circuit breakers to the lights and outlets in the basement and started going postal on the wiring.  I cut the wiring at all the outlets and lights, then started pulling the wiring back to the panel.  From there just cut the majority of the leads since the panel was pretty accurate with everything. Since I will be rewiring everything in a much simpler way this was the easiest way to get everything out, meanwhile saving as much wiring as possible.  After the fact I ended up with three completely empty circuit breakers and two breakers with leads that only have one light on each.  I can basically get some lights up and outlets in and properly divide them and not overload anything. It worked out really well.  Side Note: I did actually almost get electrocuted.  One of the leads didn't appear as if it was wired to anything, well I cut it, nothing happened.  After investigating why a light was out in the area where my well is, my buddy and I realized that there was a GFI outlet beside the panel installed in between the lead and the circuit breaker, and well... when I cut the lead it immediately threw the GFI protection and shut the power.  Otherwise I would have been zapped.   Don't you wish life had a circuit breaker...  When things get crazy and go wrong or you make a mistake the breaker just flips, everything pauses, and you can just flip the switch and its all back to the way you want in pretty much an instant.