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I work as an electrician, and I like my job, so I'll only talk about things I've seen other contractors do. Fish wire using a nerf gun and fishing line? Sure. Unsupported over ceiling grid for hundreds of feet? Sounds fine. PVC conduit in a ceiling joist space? No glue? Thousand feet? Sure. Push the wire in as you go. Clip a new stick on and get the wire down it. Push it further. There's no need for straps or anything. Plenum rated? What's that? Minimum distance for strapping fire alarm cable? Seems to be n feet, where n is the distance between fire alarm panels. Same goes for data, telephone, and PA systems. Ya know, if it's less than 50 volts, it's not covered by the NEC and never gets inspected! WIN!
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Sep 5, 2011 08:20
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Blistex posted:Or a contractor who tries to skim some money and installs horizontal sliding windows as vertical sliders. Or a contractor that uses food coloring and water in a bug sprayer to spray cheap rough-sawn 2x4s green so the inspector doesn't notice he's not using pressure-treated exterior-grade wood on framing outside.
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Sep 26, 2011 04:53
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Rotten Cookies posted:How much time and effort would that cost vs just getting the PT wood in the first place? Well, it was already installed, and the wood was leftover from another job, so they could probably charge twice for it.
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Sep 27, 2011 09:04
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micnato posted:I spent a few months working for a mason. He was full of disaster tales from when he was a young guy working for somebody else. My favorite is this block wall garage they were building, and the boss wanted to save money so he stuffed empty mortar bags in the cells, then "core-filled" the tops. This was an 8-foot wall on top of a 4-foot frost wall. He was shocked when the customer called back and said that one of the walls fell over. I was doing a remodel in a school and we had to core-drill through a couple of solid-poured block walls. Second layer of blocks from the top, we hit mortar bags. Third layer of blocks we made the holes with a hammer. The school was built in the late 50s, and everyone was amazed that wall hadn't fallen.
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Aug 17, 2012 17:58
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Papercut posted:I think part of the reason it can be so bad is that it is very common to have the security system as part of a separate contract from the rest of the building work, so it's not under the supervision of a general contractor or engineer. Administrative people do this to save money (or to transfer the cost, for example from a bond measure that has a strict upper limit over to a general facilities budget), but it means the security system gets half-assed into the building after the fact. There's this, and the fact that if it's low-voltage stuff, it doesn't generally require a separate permit. For FA around here, the electricians do the conduit/box installs, and the FA guys pull wire and screw in devices after the final. If the security guys come in after the electrical final, then no inspector looks at their mechanical execution of work. Only the building owners say anything, and that's only for cosmetic stuff (crooked panels, etc.) No building owner I've dealt with has popped ceiling tiles to see the unsecured spaghetti above their security panel.
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Jan 21, 2013 18:29
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:I'd be thinking the first time a heavy wind comes through. I'm thinking the first time he tries to get a tiller through the door. Tiller (under power) hits the door "frame" and just flattens the whole structure, monster-truck style (in super slo-mo).
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Apr 3, 2013 18:41
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Nyyen posted:
The shed of doom from bcsportbikes.com went fully viral, and for good reason. There are TIME LAPSE VIDEOS of the construction. I stared, mouth agape, at the construction techniques displayed.
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Apr 6, 2013 21:56
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Leperflesh posted:Thank you for this explanation. You're required by code to have a main breaker now, and have been for a very, very long time. If you wanna take all your pix and whatnot over to the electrical thread, we can help you there. kid sinister posted:A multiwire branch circuit is where 2 or more circuits on different phases share a neutral. It's mainly for safety reasons. Usually, those 2 circuits would be bundled into the same /3 cable on the red and black wires along with the white neutral. Well, that cable runs somewhere in the house. Suppose that someday you have to do work on the box where that /3 cable ends, so you shut off the circuit with the black wire at the panel, thinking you're safe. Then you go to untwist the red wire also in that box and you get shocked. The new code tries to fix that from ever happening. By tying those two circuits together, shutting one off forces you to shut the other off as well. This has been code for major appliances using multiple phases for decades. Depending on the manufacturer, either all the levers on that multiphase breaker are tied together, or that mulitphase breaker only has a single handle. It's actually more insidious. You turn off the black wire, untwist the neutral, and get SHOCKED BY THE NEUTRAL! The power goes down the red hot, through some device, and is returning to the panel on the white. So now you just got shocked by a white wire, on a circuit you thought was off. The code dealt with this originally by prohibiting devices in multiwire branch circuits from interrupting the neutral. No using an outlet to daisy-chain neutrals, etc. Now, like you said, they require a handle tie so both (or all three) circuits go off.
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Jun 18, 2013 00:39
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SpartanIV posted:At least they used a screwdriver. In my parents house they used a hammer to find studs so there are giant hammer sized holes behind most of the cabinets. I use a cubic inch rare earth magnet to find studs. It sticks to the nails/screws used to hold up the drywall. It's been rattling around in my bag long enough that it's fairly grimy. I sometimes get complaints that I've left smudges on walls, but it's way more certain than a stud finder, and less destructive than a hammer.
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Jul 17, 2013 23:15
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Shifty Pony posted:I was chatting with my neighbor about the crazy in my house and he showed me how his utilities are laid out. He is a mechanical engineer with experience in semiconductor fabrication plant gas, chemical, and electric supply. I tried to do that with my house. I was making a map and putting it on a set of prints. I found some incredibly strange stuff, and wires to/from nowhere. There's a circuit that does one outlet in every room of the house. There's a circuit that does a light in one room, a receptacle in another room, a switch to nowhere, and some thing else that I can't find. There's a switch that switches another switch, but isn't a 3-way, and doesn't have enough conductors to BE a 3-way, and was apparently original.
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Jul 18, 2013 07:07
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longview posted:That would be pretty cool if you lived in an area with frequent outages, could put a dual conversion rack mount UPS on that circuit and hook a generator into that. More likely it's just someone being an idiot unfortunately. I live in a place with frequent outages. I may set up a system to do this. My fridge is currently plugged into this circuit. You are brilliant. This forum has a way of making lemonade out of lemons.
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Jul 18, 2013 15:52
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I did it. I found a horrible thing today. I opened up a wall to figure out why there was a junction box with 5' of cable hanging out of it and none of the outlets in the front bedroom worked. I took off a sheet of drywall and found a j-box with all its wires capped. No hole cut into the wall for this, just an empty box behind sheetrock. The wires weren't hot. In fact, they ran to an outlet in the same room. That outlet ran to the aforementioned j-box, which was on the other side of the wall at 7'. So I'm looking at this j-box with its outlet and I see four NM cables running to it. I can see two going into the wall (hopefully to the two outlets downstream) and two going to the ceiling (hopefully to the two j-boxes I can see. I pull the outlet out, and I'm confronted with Homeowner Refit Horror. The outlet only comes out about 2" from the wall, because that's all the wire that's available. Eight wires terminate on this device. Two screws and two stabs each side; hot and neutral. The ground was pigtailed. No wire was live in this assemblage, thankfully, nor ever had been. I pull all the wires off this porn star of an outlet, pigtail them so it's one hot, one neutral going in, and everything else is combined in the back of the box. Delete the hidden j-box and run its feed over to the light switch supplying the room. I now have power to the room. Success. Reinstall sheetrock (leaving gaps and spacing this time), and it's Miller Time. I found out later that the PO had an extension cord wrapped around the ceiling to provide power to this room. For thirty years. Both ends cut off, just tape holding it up there. When it would fall, more tape would go up without the old being removed. I thankfully never saw it in that state, and just had a room that never had power (and a mystery in the walls).
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Aug 10, 2013 06:30
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I'm trying to figure out how to get rid of all these pavers. I'm leaning towards making a bunch of symmetrical raised beds somewhere in the yard and using them as paths around them. It would look nice and snotty.
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Nov 1, 2013 23:49
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Jeherrin posted:I would like this man to come and just built a cinderblock wall repeatedly in various rooms of my house so that when I'm stressed out from work I can just watch this for hours on end. No joke, he would do that for his hourly wage. I've seen block crews slam up block during all the daylight hours, 7 days a week, for months on end. They just get good at being perfect. Mortar in the right consistency, with the right volume on the hod, with the correct number of bricks. 200' wall, 8 guys doing a course an hour; that stuff just flies up. They take breaks every couple of hours or so while the scaffold crew puts another level on. There's a whole other ground crew just counting bricks, cutting bricks for pipes/outlets/lights/doors, mixing mortar, getting scaffolding ready. But the guys up top just lay bricks like that dude, one after the other, nearly nonstop. Very impressive.
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Nov 4, 2013 04:56
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It's also the precise series of videos used when my wife built our deck this year. If there's something massively illegal going on, it's important to know now, rather than in a few months when we sell the place.
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Oct 25, 2014 15:17
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:That reminds me, I'm going to want to add replace my circuit breaker panel with one with more capacity at some point. How big of a job is this, and is it "hire a licensed electrician you idiot" level, or "do some reading and learn the safety measures and you can do it yourself" level? Show up in the "don't burn your house down" thread, but it is possible for a random person with little training to completely rewire a residential household safely by themselves. You must have the power company remove your meter, but you can do every other part yourself.
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Dec 4, 2014 01:52
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canyoneer posted:Is that a typo? I thought that cleanroom manufacturing environments were crazy-high spec and doing something like 10 air changes per hour. This is HVAC math and has a bunch of rules of thumb and stuff built in. Notice he's multiplying square footage by a percentage and getting cubic feet per minute. His calculation would change 80% of the bottom foot of air every minute for six air changes per hour. sqft*8ft standard ceiling *.8 air/min *60 min/hr = 6 air/hr.
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Jan 20, 2015 15:27
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Awesome, thanks! That will be quite helpful. The slab layout guys at many construction sites do a batter board in each corner like this (only two walls show due to the limitations of ASCII art): pre:/ \ | | \ / I've also seen one dude do layout and get everything perfectly square using 100lb braided fishing line; it's got absolutely no stretch, so measuring diagonals is as simple as tying a loop, dropping it over the corner nail, getting a distance and moving your distance-in-hand to the other corner/diagonal. For height-above-grade, you pick a spot on your property that won't move and define it as your baseline. A concrete slab somewhere close by works. You then build a form above this reference point and put a nail in it "at grade." You then level the tops of your stakes off against that. Form work/slab layout uses a LOT of scrap lumber to do with precision. If your ground is relatively flat and solid, you can get away with 2' stakes, but if you've got a lot of variation or soft soil where people driving machines/walking near the stakes can shift them, use a 4' stake and really hammer it into the ground
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Jan 22, 2015 16:18
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I like how you have the same typo as from the imgur album that I was about to post. I've gotta be missing something. Those power boxes are GFCI distribution systems and are designed specifically for that kind of environment. I didn't see anything bad in the second pic either. There are cords in the water. So? It's not like electricity goes sideways out of the cord. That's what the insulation is for. They've even got the connectors up out of the water, which is the only part likely to fail and short out. Which doesn't electrify the whole puddle: it just causes a little amber light to come on in the distribution box, and you can't turn power on while the circuit is faulted.
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Mar 22, 2015 00:01
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I think this photo is probably worse though:
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some texas redneck posted:I wish I only used 800 kWh a month. Are inverters STILL that bad? I looked a couple of years ago and there were plenty of smallish inverters (5-30kVA) that output 64-step sine waves with less THD than utility power, 95-96% efficiency at full load and 90-95% efficiency at light load. fake edit: Yeah, these things are still around, and the efficiencies are even better now, with cleaner sine waves and better frequency control. 98.8% max eff, with 93% weighted eff, 20kVA.
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Mar 25, 2015 11:41
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I think our low record in the winter is about 900 - that's with a gas furnace, LED/CFL lighting in the entire house, very conservative thermostat settings, etc.
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kastein posted:The place was wired for three and four way switches for the living room light, but some chucklefuck maintenance handyman had replaced them all with regular switches and swapped wires till it worked. As a result there were 3 switches that ran the light, and any of them would turn it off but they all had to be on to turn the light on. That's logic-puzzle level crap there. I was an electrican's helper-for-hire for a little bit before I got my license, and I showed up on a jobsite as they were trimming out. There were a couple other guys there. One guy professed to have his license, but the guys running the job didn't check. It was a hotel, and the job was to hook up all the room entryway lights. The door opens and there's a 3-way light switch, a small coatroom, and a bit of a partition with a 3-way light switch on the back of it. Both switches ran up to the light fixture above the coat-hanging area. All the wire was run, drywall up and painted, just waiting for devices and fixtures. The group of people that showed up were divvied into groups. One group would put in the entry 3-way, one would do the partition 3-way, and one would do the light fixtures. We started at different spots so we wouldn't be in each others' way. Lunch comes, and everyone's done, so we gather around for our paychecks. First, though, they had to check the lights. To the breaker panel they go, and click, clicPOW.... click, clicPOW. Every other breaker pops as it's energized. All the rooms on one side of the hall are shorted. WTF. Turns out the guy "with his license" had only EVER done control voltage work (AC/HVAC/Intercom) and had NO IDEA how to wire a light fixture. The back of the fixture was all NM cable, so the two travellers had to go together, the power had to go down to one switch, come back from the other switch and hit the light, and the neutral from the power had to go together. This guy had just twisted all the "colors" together, then put a red and a black wire (seemingly at random) on the light fixture. So black, red, blue, green were all jammed under wire nut, white unconnected to anything and folded back into the box, and a random red and black wire connected to the light. Note that green is one of those wires. Yep. He'd shortwired power to ground through switches (or not) in EVERY box. Needless to say, we all got an afternoon's work fixing that guy's stuff, and he was allowed to leave without a paycheck.
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Mar 25, 2015 20:57
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ColHannibal posted:No need to go Waco, I'm just saying to scare the punk. Homemade artillery simulator. In actual construction tales news: I saw a newly-constructed sewage lift station yesterday. It's down by the lake and right next to a heavily-salted road. Stainless trough mounted to painted steel strut with galvanized fasteners. It's only been a couple of weeks, and there's already rust. The antenna mast is just standard EMT with standard galvanized compression fittings. Again, stainless steel straps with galvanized hardware holding it to the cabinet. Already rusting. The excess antenna cable is coiled up and zip-tied to the cabinet leg on the slab. I hope coax is OK getting stepped on. My favorite part is an obviously JUST-drilled 1/2" hole all the way through the slab with an extension cord coming out of it, running across the pad, across the grass a few yards, and plugged into the main service convenience outlet. GFCI, but no in-use cover. The hole still has hammer drill dust around it, and is the exact size of the cord. If they ever want to stop using that for whatever they're using it for, they're cutting one end off that cord.
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Apr 5, 2015 13:35
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Not that that's not hilarious, but do you often stop to observe the craftsmanship of sewer lift stations on your way to work or something? As a professional electrician, I can't NOT look at the mechanical execution of others's work. It drives my wife crazy. I'm always staring at ceilings and walls and electrical panels and stuff. I notice when all the lenses in fluorescent lights aren't pointed the same way. Sprinkler heads not in a row. Missing/worn/loose/damage ceiling tiles. That kind of thing.
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Apr 5, 2015 17:03
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SkunkDuster posted:Not crappy construction, but this seems to be the most knowledgeable place about code issues, so I have a question. It is his job to make sure the electrical and fire don't interfere, but sprinkler heads are basically a "do not contact this" kind of thing. The Fire Marshall usually also has to sign off the permit, and the electrical inspector will certainly know him. Electrical inspectors are also very frequently fire inspectors, so they'll know if something wiggy's going on, and you, as the tenant rep are within your (seen as assholish) right to ask the inspector if a particular part of the install is kosher. The sprinklers are there to prevent the fire from spreading JUST long enough to get the people out. If it sprays on the lights and shorts them out, then that's cool. There are probably emergency lights that will provide sufficient illumination. If not, and it ends up that there are sprinkler lines run through your fixtures, absolutely post them in this thread.
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May 13, 2015 06:40
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stuxracer posted:Super easy to fix that issue though. I know some people that had a pantry like that. They went to put in a pocket door and found the main vent stack for the kitchen. So they just draped a sheet over the exposed studs and now-empty doorframe and just left it that way for like two years.
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May 21, 2015 05:27
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The Gardenator posted:According to the news article, when new that balcony was legally designed for 60psf. Amm, how does "water seeping into beams" mean dry rot? Isn't that NORMAL rot?
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Jun 17, 2015 15:03
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Ferremit posted:Hope whatever he hooked to to that was switchmode.. cos if im not mistaken thats an AU/NZ socket and we run 220/240v.... The military exchanges (NEX/PX/BX) overseas sell third-party power supplies for laptops that take "12-400VAC 50-400Hz" for reasonable prices. There's even a model with two USB charge-only ports on the side. They're typically sold with a cord for the country you're in and a US cord, and there's usually a decent selection of other cords on the shelf nearby. But people are cheap, and if they've got the US cord and $3 worth of nail clippers, why would they shell out $20 for the cord they actually need? When we deployed overseas, we flew over on an AN-124, and it had completely stupid plugs onboard. Since we were in the air for like fifty hours or something (not really, but it felt like it), we soldered some #12AWG solid copper wire to the plug of one of our US power strips and jammed that into the onboard stuff, then just plugged our SMPSs into that. Slightly more vibration-resistant, and we even mostly covered the exposed current-carrying parts with electrical tape. WE also made sure to not take any pictures of this massive safety violation.
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Jul 19, 2015 17:20
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pac man frogs posted:Yeah, exactly. Seems like more of a pain than just putting the tile in Not really, you've got the offcuts just lying around. You don't have to cut any new tile. Put a couple of pieces under the vanity support boards and move on. A couple tiles saved, and you don't have to wait until after grout is dried to install the vanity. I'm digging that 22.5 on the black iron drainpipe with some kind of compression fitting into the P-trap.
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Aug 1, 2015 03:38
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Qwijib0 posted:But killing the air handler should also kill the transformer powering the relay to the compressor, so the whole system should shut off. Unless you get a system that's powered from 220V and the air handler is powered from the condenser. Then the main disconnect is outside the house, and there's a convenience power disconnect switch by the air handler. In well-designed systems, that switch also sends a signal back to the outdoor unit that pulls power from the condenser contactors.
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Sep 26, 2015 20:56
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spog posted:While this is partially true: when was the last time you saw a new-build house that was built with genuine craftmanship and skill - rather than MDF and adhesives? There's a family that runs a general contracting business where my parents live. They put in a subdivision, and the first four lots went to the family members. The GC, the lead framer, the electrician, and the plumber. Those four houses were masterworks. The rest of the houses in the subdivision were pretty good, as the family prides itself on good worksmanship, but nowhere NEAR as perfect as those model homes.
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Nov 1, 2015 15:47
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Enourmo posted:you wouldn't need a very thick piece of iron; you're looking to transfer the heat, not store it. Make it just thick enough that it won't melt on an inductor set to 'high" and you'd bee good to go. I use a 4 11/16" box cover for the one (aluminum) pot that doesn't work with my induction top. Crappy construction: I was at work today and needed to fill a bucket. I was directed to a spigot that hangs down from the rafters; all solid copper pipe. Turns out that used to be an exterior wall a couple of additions ago, and they just cut the wall out, but left the hose bib dangling. Fifteen feet or so of copper pipe without a pipe strap to be seen.
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Dec 2, 2015 02:53
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Sagebrush posted:Huh, interesting. So the eye wash station right in front of an outlet is also likely to be within code, despite all appearances? If it were a sink, that outlet would have to be GFCI, but since it's emergency eyewash, then probably the electrical inspector would walk up to that and say "guys, really? Move that about two feet thataway."
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Jan 16, 2016 12:29
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GotLag posted:8 million pounds of thrust and as many posts about it You joke, but the rocket test stands out in the desert are massive, enormous, and concrete. I was at Huntsville taking the tour, and the guide was talking about the F-1. Being inquisitive, I asked how they tested 1.5million pounds-of-thrust engines, and he said "we bolted it to 3 million pounds of concrete."
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Mar 22, 2016 01:11
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We've been popping breakers recently as the A/C went out in half the building and now there are fans plugged in EVERYWHERE. While resetting a breaker, I decided to look at the main to see what our service was. I was greeted with this:  Butchered used toner cartridge box held on with silver tape as guards for the main feed from the transformer outside. I didn't complain too much. I just sat in the electric room enjoying the only conditioned space on our end of the building, waiting for another breaker to pop, and possibly a firey death.
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Jul 31, 2016 17:12
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Blue Footed Booby posted:The switch that shocked me was the disposal, in the same box as the kitchen light. Like, in hindsight it kinda makes sense that what amounts to an appliance is on a different circuit than lights, but i still feel like I wouldn't have seen that coming even if I weren't doing home repair drunk. If you didn't wire it yourself, assume it's done in the cheapest, laziest way possible. If this means two, three, four circuits in a box, so be it. If it means neutrals got mixed up on those three circuits, so be it. Just realize you can turn off two circuits, have no live wires, and get shocked by a neutral that someone crossed up somewhere else.
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Aug 14, 2016 15:25
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Terrible Robot posted:I, too, love gravity. Otherwise, the only thing keeping your bike from being stolen is about 12 slug of additional inertia. Content-wise, the roof at my job is apparently at the low point. Last time it rained really hard, enough water found its way in to drain into a cabinet full of avionics. This caused the boss to finally complain loudly enough to the building maintenance guys that they went to fix it. "we installed something up there that should keep the water out." "Like a roof?" "..."
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Sep 25, 2016 19:54
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Motronic posted:More likely a piece of tin smeared with tar. That should work for a few weeks. More than likely just a cofferdam of sandbags and a tarp.
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Sep 25, 2016 20:16
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Crotch Fruit posted:For inches you just put a " after all the fractions. Or use hundredths/thousandths and be in the same situation as if you were using metric. For other SAE unit the division practically does itself for you. Or you talk to an old machinist who does everything in thousandths of an inch and "tenths" which is a tenth of a thousandth (a ten thousandth, 0.0001"). This gets especially infuriating when they're making metric parts, and they say stuff like "we're gonna get the OD of this cylinder to 18mm within a tenth," and that DOESN'T mean 18+-.1mm, it means 18mm +- 0.0001 inches. Then "we'll cut this thread 2mm deep, but we've got 1/64" or so of play."
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May 30, 2017 01:29
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`Nemesis posted:Found in the ceiling of a school... no idea if it's live, I suspect it is, but I wasn't gonna touch that poo poo. I'm a contractor and my reason for being up in the ceiling has nothing to do with AC power. That's just temp construction lighting that didn't get removed before the drywallers came. The electrical contractor just decided to cut that lamp off and go home. Happens all the time, it is very likely not live anymore.
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Jun 16, 2017 02:44
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Yu-Gi-Ho! posted:Nailed it. Like Platystemon mentioned, they're often tiny neon bulbs. Or used to be. Newer ones usually use LEDs. Either way, just replace the switch. Neons are still cheaper than LEDs and last longer, and are good for all the other reasons. In the LED ones, the super-cheap stuff, the capacitor is there instead of the resistor. They're using capacitive reactance for their voltage drop; the capacator doesn't do anything for the flicker (that's a function of a single LED only lighting on half the AC cycle).
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Jun 25, 2017 14:43
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