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Agreed, be VERY careful removing the sheath from the UF. I like to use my sharpest utility knife blade and carefully slit it to the bare minimum depth that results in it tearing off when I yank on it.
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Oct 2, 2012 07:13
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 04:56 |
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In the 60s/70s you could get away with just grounding to the nearest pipe or whatever, I'm not sure where things stand now. I'd suggest asking your town building inspector, but he'll almost certainly tell you to run all new cable, especially since running all new cable and running a single ground wire are about the same cost time wise, it's all in the time to either fish the wire in or open the wall and install it the traditional way.
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Oct 8, 2012 01:25
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Check the fuse or breaker the circuit is powered by. If it is a 15A you only need 14 (but could use 12 no problem, I often do if I think I may want to upgrade to 20A on that branch in the future) but if it is a 20A breaker everything on the circuit needs to be 12ga or better.
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Oct 8, 2012 04:17
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You generally use what's called an "old work" box and fish the cable in. It just clamps itself onto the drywall, no stud attachment needed.
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Oct 11, 2012 01:43
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Jesus  That GFCI outlet is doing absolutely nothing... unless the breaker powering the load terminals of the outlet is tripped, then the outlet has GFCI protection. That's hosed up in so many ways.
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Oct 22, 2012 02:53
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As long as they're both on the same leg, nothing happens, maybe the GFCI circuitry smokes, not sure exactly how they're built. If they're on different legs, you get fireworks and one (or possibly two) tripped breakers.
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Oct 23, 2012 22:30
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My Spirit Otter posted:It's energized for 240v and will probably overheat the GFCI something fierce. Can you please explain what you mean by this in a bit more detail? I am fairly certain you are wrong. The only way your statement makes sense wiring wise would result in an immediate breaker trip.
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Oct 24, 2012 15:54
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Best way: pull new cable for the circuit all the way from the panel. Cut the knob and tube back as far as you can, insulate the ends - if any of the knob and tube will remain active, that is, else just abandon the unreachable portions in place. Make sure you check every outlet and light in the house to make sure they aren't powered off the circuit if you intend to completely disable and replace it, finding out the living room light doesn't work anymore after the fact is not a fun surprise. You may be able to get away with replacing just the portions that will be insulated with romex and properly grounding it, but don't count on it. Ask the inspector first. As for the thick wire, that is actually regular knob and tube cloth+rubber insulated wire with impregnated cloth loom tubing slipped over it. It was commonly used where the wires were inside walls, passed through framing between floors, entered junction boxes or were otherwise at risk of chafing.
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Oct 25, 2012 17:06
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I guess those could work, personally I don't like them, but that's probably superstition and a general suspicion of newfangled things like plastic boxes and NM-C punchdown splices. What will you need junction boxes for? If you're doing a whole new circuit basically, there's no real reason to need them except where adding lights or outlets, which require a new box anyways. Only reason I'd use junction boxes anywhere is if you're tapping into the old knob and tube outside of the to-be-insulated area for your power source, which may or may not fly with your building inspector like I said.
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Oct 25, 2012 22:03
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happens to everyone, no worries! The hardest part is resisting cutting the cable to length until you've snaked it completely in. I suggest adding a healthy 10-15% to the estimated length of the wire you'll need - possibly more. There's also a significant discount to be had if you buy coils 100' or longer, at least last time I bought romex, the 25 and 50' coils were significantly marked up but 100, 250, and 1000 were within five or ten bucks per 1000' of each other so I just buy in 250 foot coils now. I'm about to open up my third coil working on this house... or is it my fourth? I don't even know anymore  There's nothing like realizing you're out of cable and not done fishing through a long run yet, thus my 10-15% fudge factor suggestion. Even worse when you fish it in working alone, then go back downstairs to check on how much you have left and realize it's too short and the end has disappeared into the wall. Only had to do that once to learn my lesson... that was ten years ago, I'm gutting my current place completely for a variety of reasons which makes the wiring super easy.
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Oct 26, 2012 00:36
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He was asking about upgrading from knob and tube, and installing insulation, so I am going to bet on 1930s or earlier...
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Oct 26, 2012 23:25
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Bare, green, green with yellow stripes: ONLY for ground/earth wiring. White: ONLY for neutral wiring. If nothing else is available in the cable used, you are permitted to permanently mark each end of a white wire using ink, paint, or tape of any color other than white to indicate it's not a neutral. IIRC NEC 2011 has made it a requirement that there be either a neutral wire or space in a raceway for adding a neutral wire in the future at all switch boxes, so you probably won't gain much from using a white wire as anything but neutral anyways. Any other color: hot wire. How are you getting a choice in wire colors? Are you running individual conductors in conduit/raceway? I hope you aren't thinking of running individual wires directly in-wall/on-wall, as that's definitely against code, needs to be some kind of sheathed cable such as NM-C, BX/MC, UF for exterior/buried cable, etc.
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Nov 1, 2012 18:32
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Hopefully you're correct and he's talking about jacket colors - I assumed otherwise because I've only seen white/yellow/orange NM cable, like Nemico. I really do like that they're color coding the jacket now, makes it way easier for me to pick the right coil of cable.
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Nov 1, 2012 19:06
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First thing that comes to mind is Google Sketchup, though I've never used it. ... I should map my house at some point, in something other than the software I'm using to design my radiant heating system. Dumb question for the Canadian electricians, if there are any on here: in Canada do you use white/black for neutral/hot, or the EU/AC/IEC blue/brown? General color code info, covers many standards, countries, and eras of wiring: http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_5/chpt_2/2.html kastein fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Nov 1, 2012 |
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Nov 1, 2012 21:11
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Dumb question for 3 phase stuff. How are you going to run a bunch of 120v/240v laptops and desktops off a delta 3 phase system without a delta-wye transformer? I've never really truly understood 3 phase in any way except 3 phase generator powering a 3 phase load, and delta still confuses me a bit, while wye makes sense and high-leg delta mostly makes sense to me.
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Nov 5, 2012 21:04
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Try wiggling the cable, maybe there's a broken wire?
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Nov 20, 2012 20:45
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Are they aware of the phase to phase jumper? If they are, there's no way in hell they'll hook up the third wire without either removing the jumper or asking you to have it removed. Fireworks would ensue. Who put the jumper in? That's a bit sketchy, though I can see it being useful in an emergency of some sort.
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Nov 26, 2012 00:26
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yep - basically every "living space" is what I understood. Even including lighting circuits. I've used the non AFCI breakers that came with my breaker panel to get things up and running and tested in some cases, but always replace them with AFCI as soon as I possibly can. I basically bought my local Home Depot's entire stock of 20A AFCI breakers for my panel type a few months ago and it took them a while to restock.
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Dec 8, 2012 05:06
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I think I dropped around 100-150 or so, iirc. They run $30/ea or so, and I know I'll be using a lot - they had a whole bunch of repackaged ones on the shelf at like a 50% discount so I jumped on every one of those I could find as well as a few of the unopened ones. Installed/tested the repackaged ones first, obviously.
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Dec 8, 2012 05:14
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Speaking of fire alarms. Should fire alarms be on an AFCI circuit? My opinion is that they shouldn't be, since I want them getting power no matter what, but I'd like a pro answer instead of my intuition on this for all the obvious reasons.
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Dec 8, 2012 20:36
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It could be a 120 to 220/240 transformer, too. Depending on how it was built and how much it has been abused I could see that tripping a gfci.
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Dec 10, 2012 16:55
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Home depot carries #1 aluminum, I believe. If they don't you can always go bigger, so 0 or 2/0 would be an option. Question - how are you going to power a 100 amp subpanel and the existing 90a of load off a 120a panel? Maybe I am missing something here.
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Jan 17, 2013 16:10
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You can get surface mount and plug-in relays from Mouser too, just not as many plug-in ones. Try digikey too. Anything under 12V is generally considered a "logic level relay" iirc; many have low coil currents so they can be driven directly by some families of digital logic ICs so their switching terminals can be used to control a larger relay or a small load.
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Jan 18, 2013 17:11
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I'd almost put money on a floating neutral problem in your case. What's happening is the microwave is on the opposite hot leg, so when it draws a big load from that leg, the result of the somewhat-floating neutral is that the neutral voltage gets "dragged" further towards the other leg, which being 180 degrees out of phase with the one you're measuring, results in an apparent voltage increase on the lamp you're checking.
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Jan 22, 2013 08:04
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I don't know if that's legal now on new construction, and modern BX/MC has ground wire in it anyways, but back in the day when BX/MC was common in residential construction, that's actually how they did it. My parents house was a horrible hodgepodge of knob and tube and BX/MC up till me and my dad redid the whole first floor with 12ga NM-C so everything would actually be grounded and properly polarized. The second floor is still a mess as far as I know. Sometimes you'll get lucky and the knob/tube won't actually have any knobs or tubes inside the wall itself, just in the floor joists and where they go up into the wall, so you can use one of the old wires to fish the new romex in. If there's a knob or tube in the way obviously this gets shot right to hell in a hurry. kastein fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jan 23, 2013 |
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Jan 23, 2013 05:10
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Doubt they're on all the time, that would severely impact tube filament lifespan. It sounds to me like a bad/loose outlet or wire on the back of the outlet... is the circuit fed with a regular breaker, a GFCI breaker, or an AFCI breaker?
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Jan 25, 2013 22:47
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backstab is great if you're building mcmansions and tract housing in a boom economy with 50c outlets, but a loving travesty if you're anyone else. I actually do like the back-wire screw terminal ones I've been getting recently - straight stripped wire goes into a hole or under a clamping plate on the side from the back, tighten the screw, done. No bending the wire into a loop and yet the connection is still good and solid.
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Jan 28, 2013 02:50
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I doubt an AC motor is going to be very happy about that kind of shenanigans, but AC motors aren't anywhere near my specialty.
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Feb 4, 2013 06:13
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jesus, they make that poo poo up to 1500kcmil at 18lbs/foot what in gently caress do you do to even get that off the spool, hire a superhero? Or do they ship it straight and just tie a set of wheels and an orange flag to the rear end end like you do with utility poles? Hope you don't need more than 50 feet or so!
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Feb 14, 2013 05:03
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XmasGiftFromWife posted:I have tried googling and was unsure of my findings. Just *HOW BIG IS IT?* (500, 750, 1000)? I'm guessing massive compared to the 12-2 and 14-2 I use in the house. The datasheet I found says 1500 3-cond w/g is... 4.25" diameter. Yep, that's a cable alright. It's too bad you had to pull from an inside room to an inside room, that just blows. How much does an 8000lb tugger cost, anyways? I can get a 12000lb truck winch from a good brand for $1600 on amazon, combine it with a $100 junkyard engine and a couple alternators and end up with a 12000lb winch on a structural steel cart/sled for well under $2000. And that's assuming it's not possible to just pull the 12VDC series wound motor off and slap a 120VAC one on. The cheapest 8000lb I found was a greenlee for 8 grand way lighter to carry around, I guess.
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Feb 14, 2013 16:49
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yeah, it's only going to go one direction. I'm guessing it will spin the way the cat in your avatar does, but it might go the other way too.kid sinister posted:I think that might be your best bet. A great example would be a modern car's steering wheel with cruise control and radio controls. They use concentric rings with spring loaded contacts. Most of them actually use a clockspring, a very thin ribbon cable coiled up inside a plastic housing. That's why turning the steering wheel while the steering column is disconnected from the rack/pinion or steering box is a bad idea, if you don't get it back in the same spot before reconnecting it, the clockspring can either run out of slack or get bunched up and tear when you turn to one steering lock or the other after putting it back together. Often the horn is run with a slip ring while the cruise control buttons and airbag squib are run through a clockspring.
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Feb 18, 2013 01:20
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oldskool posted:Speaking of running oversized cable, is it possible to use 15A outlets with 10ga wire? It's not the outlets I'm having trouble with, it's the lovely mobile home circuitry that has half the kitchen, the office & the spare bedroom's lights & outlets all sharing one 15A breaker & I'd prefer to replace as little as possible to make it so I can microwave without shutting off the office computer & the lights. It should be possible, if you use quality outlets with side wire (preferably side wire with a clamp, so you don't have to loop the wire... I'm partial to the leviton commercial grade ones from home depot as a JAFHO) - but why? Even with 10ga wire, you shouldn't have more than a 15A outlet on a circuit with a 15A breaker iirc, so you aren't really going to solve anything. Splitting the circuits up so you have one per room or at least splitting the circuit in half will help more. I don't believe it'll work with the 49 cent back-wire push-in outlets, but those things are the devil anyways.
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Mar 4, 2013 18:04
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If the breaker detects both series and parallel arc faults, it may just be a lovely switch in his lamp or the bulb is loose. Without fixing anything on the lamp, plug it in and try turning it on by moving the switch as slowly as possible, if the breaker trips again, there ya go. Then try tightening the bulb. Clearly the breaker works, or works too well (might have been a nuisance trip) so I wouldn't worry much, just make sure you know what's causing it and either fix or trash the lamp if it is indeed the cause.
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Mar 7, 2013 17:26
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yeah, I have done some dangerous poo poo in my time, including disconnecting a meter drop by cutting the wires at the drip loop to the service entrance weatherhead, live, and there is absolutely no loving way I would replace a panel with a live feed. One wrong move (even slipping and letting go of a stiff springy wire) and your unfused service entrance cable just started arc welding itself to the panel enclosure, no more than an arms length away. No. loving. Way.
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Mar 11, 2013 19:48
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IOwnCalculus posted:He's batshit insane in the best way - the kind that lets us all watch him being deadly stupid without getting ourselves hurt. Most of the stuff he plays with (at least the low voltage, high current stuff) you could put one hand on each wire and never even really feel it. High voltage? Yeah, gotta be careful with that.
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Mar 14, 2013 23:12
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Bank posted:Each of my bedrooms has an outlet that is controlled by the wall switch. We have lamps connected to the outlets, but now want the outlets to be always on, and the switch to control a ceiling light instead. Almost no city is going to let you retrofit anything to knob and tube wiring without ripping that entire circuit out and redoing it with proper modern cable and junction boxes. You can generally replace switches and outlets with new ones, but modifying the circuit requires bringing it up to code, for very good reasons. Often old knob and tube wiring is very brittle from people pulling the "penny in the fusebox" trick in the past, and messing with it will crack the insulation off. Also, there's the whole "nobody knows how good those splices hanging in a big pile of blown in insulation are" thing, and the fact that there's no ground and no one is really sure which wire is the neutral.
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Mar 18, 2013 23:54
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crocodile posted:if the only "power" at the plug is the switch leg from the switch location, pigtailing off of it won't change the fact that it's the switch leg. you would have to tie it through at the switch to have constant power to the plug..and run a fresh switch leg up to your light location. but then you run into where to get a neutral from because with knob and tube there is rarely a neutral in a switch box. Seriously, go look at his diagrams again dude. He wants to do a lot of bad things (which I and others have already covered) but he didn't get that wrong.
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Mar 19, 2013 03:29
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Yeah, individual wires are way easier to run in conduit. That being said, I'll run UF underground (following proper burial depth + cover guidelines) and then stuff it into a couple feet of PVC conduit (not the flexible stuff, I dunno, that looks crummy IMO) to a junction box aboveground where the wiring goes inside the building. That way you don't have to do much other than stuff the cable through like 2-4 feet of conduit and into a box.
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Mar 21, 2013 01:28
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oldskool posted:First electrical project out of the way: I finally got around to disabling the light switch that controlled half my living room. That was a 3-way switch, probably. You may have another switch controlling the same set of stuff lurking somewhere.
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Mar 21, 2013 03:35
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(and it took me way longer than it should have to remember the proper term) and in the process of removing it I managed to rip out part of the stabbing apparatus. It also had three wires for some reason, two on the top half of the switch & one on the bottom. One was from whatever else is on the circuit, one went to the half of my living room the switch controlled, but I have no idea where the third cable went. My best guess is that they wired the switch to the outlets, then decided they wanted the circuit to continue on into the kitchen for some reason & just piggybacked on the always-hot side of the switch rather than running a new circuit. Said circuit not only includes the outlets in the kitchen, but also the electric pilot light for the gas stove as my wife not-so-conveniently found out.
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 04:56 |
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You've got everything on the primary right, as far as I can tell. If I had to guess, since you have 2x blue, 2x green, 2x brown, and an orange wire, you SHOULD see 2.3 volts from each brown wire to the orange wire (i.e. I suspect the 2x2.3 is a center tapped 4.6 volt winding.) You should see 9.5 volts on either the green pair or the blue pair, and 28 volts on the other one. You shouldn't see any significant / stable voltage between windings, but you might. With the transformer off, ohm out each secondary winding - when you see resistance between two wires, it means that's one of the windings. The three wires that all show resistance to each other are almost certain to be the "2 x 2.3 volt" winding.
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Apr 11, 2013 22:20
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