I’m in power electronics and its the worst of both worlds
Lol, my current house’s wiring is a bunch of DIY bullshit that even an ex-electrician spent an hour trying to figure out before telling me to pay for someone to take the time to get it fixed
They turned one of the light switches by the “front” door into a dummy plate, wired it and the fan to 2 switches in what used to be a spot for a plug, and managed to tie that whole system to the kitchen light and the outside porch light
Cannot find a consistent path with a multimeter to save our fucking lives, I gave up and we just don’t have our kitchen light working for like 1.5 years
I bought a house last year and I was somewhat mystified by why the two light switches next to the door were horizontal instead of the normal vertical arrangement. Turns out they had tried to turn a single box into a double by basically just gouging a bigger hole in the cinderblock wall and filling it with a softball-sized lump of caulk into which they stuffed the two switches; somehow they could only get this whole mess to stay in place by putting the switches horizontally. For bonus points, one of the switches did nothing except producing a distant humming noise and then tripping one of the breakers after a few seconds.
Oh, hey, this guy lived at the same house as me!
The plug-turned-switch at my place is also 2 switches sideways where they don’t really fit!
Distant humming and tripping the breaker sounds like arcing in the walls, beautiful and safe <3
arcing in the walls
Yeah, when I rebuilt the kitchen/living room wall, I found the stud that had held one of the original outlets and it was scorched black where the box had been. Kind of amazing the house was still standing.
I did reuse the scorched stud. 2x4s are fucking expensive and these ones from the 1940s were perfectly straight and completely knot-free.
My 5’x4’ bathroom has 3 seperate circuits feeding it. There is one circuit for the lights, one for the fan, and one for the single outlet in there. Those are the only things on those 3 circuits.
My basement has fully wired electrical outlets in the walls that were just sheetrocked over when the previous owner “finished the basement”.
My basement has an electrical outlet on every other stud throughout the whole thing; they are all on the same 15A breaker.
The the upstairs bedrooms are on seperate circuits except for one outlet on the north wall of each bedroom which both share the same seperate circuit.
I think my house was wired by M.C. Escher.
So you’re a software dev with no idea of affinity groups?
I am one.
Wait am I supposed to get a affinity group assigned? Like pokemon elements?
This is how weird it is for you to give two shits about your problem space…
Well then… Okay. You don’t have to care about anything. After all your only value is to write code! You are hands on keyboard… while that function is slowly being replaced with AI…
Never look up and do not under any circumstance consider how your work matters! Or how it figures into your team, the larger org, or the company. DO NOT CONSIDER WORTH. You aren’t worth it, you write code so don’t think, we are inventing machines to do that instead of people like you…
Other folks think so you don’t have to. We’ll pay them. You’re not worth it. Just keep your mouth shut and wait to execute. We know your worth and will tell you what that is…
Too late, I looked it up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_group
“Affinity groups engaged in political activism date to 19th century Spain. It was a favourite way of organization by Spanish anarchists (grupos de afinidad), and had their base in the tertulias or in the local groups.”
It’s not the best wikipedia page I have skimmed.
i feel like Lua just exacerbates this problem so much. you have to reinvent the wheel so often in that language, and i often see people reinvent the wheel differently than i would have.
not to mention the nesting…. i don’t know why, but just about every lua file i read has so many nested loops and conditional statements. it’s scary.
I have a couple of colleagues in the kitchen where I work who stand babbling, as if in a daze, if they see a mistake’s been made, sometiems for up to a minute. Very frustrating for me, as I prefer to just solve the problem. I remember one time holding my hand out to ask for the pan as my colleague stood with it, stirring it with a pair of tongs, repeatedly muttering that there weren’t enough peas in the linguine, and I was saying, fine, then give me the pan and I’ll chuck more peas in, but she just kept yammering away. Really fucks me off, haha.
The advantage of Chinese kitchen utensils, and layout is that I could just grab a ladel full of peas and dump them into the pan in such a situation. I had my own wok to deal with, but there’s a surprising amount of down time in cooking.
I work in municipal development. I was driving by and saw a hellscape development starting up and blocking traffic in the middle of Rush hour. So I pulled over, put on my City reflective vest, and went out to see who the hell authorized them for this bullshit.
They pulled out a permit with my signature on it.
This right here is the proof that programmers are engineers.
The worst, for either career, is working out that it has to be this awful. Like there’s an obvious right way, and that doesn’t work because of some aggravating circumstance, and the simple workaround wouldn’t fit the use-case, and properly doing what’s necessary would be hideously inefficient… so… bodge.
Clunk clunk get it done.
As a software developer and sometimes home electrician, I am so glad that house wiring doesn’t support git blame, but it would be nice to know who not to hire because the work in my house when I purchased it was appalling
Nice. You would probably shake your head at me because I still haven’t fixed an issue w/ a receptical. Basically, the screw for the outlet box is completely stripped, so I couldn’t actually attach the faceplate. Nothing bad has happened yet, but there are a few exposed wires.
Maybe I should go get the dremel out and fix it…
Just use a couple dabs of hot glue, or blue tack.
I bought a house last year and one of the switch boxes was filled with caulk to hold the switches in place. I’ve seen a lot of caulk abuse over the years but never anything like that.
Duct tape?
That’d probably be fine, you could make it look nice and trim or just slap it on there.
Yup. I had the furnace guy over and he complained about a surge protector the previous guy put on (apparently put in on wrong). It guess it comes w/ the territory.
Am electrician, can confirm.
To be fair, I don’t get called out to fix good work. If something’s fucked, it’s usually because some “handyman” who “totally knows what he’s doing” was there before.
Between that, and the fact that most of the people involved in wiring up houses are just laborers under an electrician’s supervision (ostensibly), yeah, I get plenty to complain about.
It also makes it easier, I feel, for customers to stomach the bill if I can adequately explain how much better off they are now that I’ve done my job.
Can I ask a question: do repair electricians often cross paths with install electricians? I don’t know much about the business of the trade, but my feeling was that the folks doing installs in new houses / buildings rarely crossed paths with the ones going around repairing everything. In my mind these are like two separate worlds.
Repair electricians definitely run into the work of install electricians, but my experience is they’re mostly two different groups. Install electricians may come back to do repairs on their own work, or if there’s a lull in new construction jobs they can pick up they might fill in the hours with some smaller repair jobs.
There are some some more specialized electricians that do a mix of both, for example my company is mostly generator focused. We’re involved in both new construction and repairs for things that are generator/transfer switch/solar related.
That’s really cool! When you do repair work for a generator I assume you’re not just going to replace the generator, so I guess you have to get in there and do component level repairs? That seems really cool. I would imagine some of the technicians would have the skills of both a mechanic and an electrician for some of those jobs?
Right, I’m fully licensed as an electrician but I also have to repair/maintain natural gas/propane/diesel engines. There’s also increasing amounts of computer/network knowledge needed for new controllers and setting up network monitoring. Overall it’s a job that really benefits from a lot of different skill sets, and has a lot of day to day variety in the work I’m doing.
Kinda depends? But yeah they’re mostly separate.
When I worked for a shop (self-employed now), they had us divided into Construction and Service, and the two pretty much kept to themselves. Service guys looked down on Construction guys because they didn’t know much about troubleshooting; Construction guys looked down on Service guys because most of them couldn’t build their way out of a wet paper bag.
Most of my experience as an apprentice was construction. I did some service calls now and then when jobsites slowed down in the winter. Now I mostly do service calls, and, frankly, it’s a HELL of a lot easier.
Sounds like the elevator trade, too
Okay! That matches with my impression! I have a friend who works in construction (drywall taper) and the guy works insanely hard, always comes home from work covered head to toe in mud or dust, and is pretty much always sore. Great guy, very friendly beer drinking buddy! But that’s a kind of work I could never do, at least working for someone else.
The troubleshooting nature of repair/service electrical seems vastly more appealing to me, though I imagine with enough experience 90% of the faults become routine!
Yeah I don’t envy drywallers. That is exhausting work, especially since a lot of them get paid by the sheet. There’s a running joke in construction about them constantly leaving soda bottles full of piss because they can’t take the time to go to the john.
Electrical construction (I mostly did commercial fwiw, but dabbled in residential and industrial as well) can be pretty rough too. Other than the brief time I worked with the union, you’re pretty much expected to bust ass all day every day, forever. It was… not fun, most of the time.
But you’re right on the last point too - once you really understand the system, most faults can be tracked down and figured out pretty quickly. After all, electricity is basically binary - either the circuit works, or it doesn’t, in which case you just keep following it back to the part where it does work, and now you can find the problem.
It’s not always that simple, like if multiple circuits are sharing a neutral, or you’ve just got a loose neutral connection… but as you may guess, if you’ve got power where you’re supposed to but the thing still won’t work, the problem is the neutral. So… it’s still kinda simple lol. There’s only so many parts to a circuit after all.
And then of course you have those rare issues where the fault is actually dangerous! Just a few years ago I called an electrician to my house because the breaker for the laundry room light fixtures was tripping every time, so I suspected a short. The electrician who showed up (hell of a guy, loved to chat!) said the ceiling light fixture was wired incorrectly and the housing was live! A quick and easy fix for him but anyone changing a lightbulb on that socket over the past 30 years was risking a shock!
Of course this is only 120V AC so not the deadliest thing in the world, but it’s always fascinated me that a fault can go unnoticed for many many years and still pose a hazard. It’s kind of like WW2 munitions or something, but completely unintentional!
If a live wire was touching the chassis and tripping the breaker likely because the chassis was grounded that would mean it’s wired correctly though. Unless like a neutral broke off and touched the live chassis causing the overload?
He said live and neutral were reversed. The ground connection to the chassis was correct though!
On my jobsite, working in new construction, we still complain a lot about what the people before us did. Everybody on the crew is a competent electrician, yet we still have plenty of times where we look at the most experienced electrician there and think “wth was he thinking??”
I feel love the ironic part is that both good and bad electricians can have the same outcome. Some wacky installation that works. The difference is that the bad guy probably doesn’t know why it works and/or the pros/cons. The great electrician realizes that while it’s probably not the “correct” way, it saves a ton of cost and work and is sufficient for what is being requested.
Yeah, there’s a lot of questionable work out there. Many homeowners underestimate the difficulty involved in some repairs too, so there’s definitely a need to justify why it took as long as it did.
Even if it doesn’t take long, it’s helpful for some if they get an explanation that shows your expertise. Which is lots of what they’re paying for usually.
Turns out that if you were doing software development but using wires instead, it’s even more cumbersome, difficult and open to shitty solutions that other idiots before you tried out, and will also be fixed by idiots after you.
Because you know, solutions to problems are hard. And we all suck.
That is part of my job description (SW Engineer)
The best part is, the previous person is usually yourself.
That guy is the worst fucking developer I’ve ever known.
Sometimes I’m blown away at how dumb my junior devs are, then I think about my first project out of college and I remember list<map<string,list<map<string,string>>>>
Give em a break at least they are learning and getting better. They notice thier previous mistakes!
And mark them with a
TODO… Git blame is telling me it’s only 5 years old… Sure it would get resolved any day now…
That also 100 percent applies to cybersecurity
My previous house was a new build. I had some weird electrical problems. I called the builder and they sent someone out.
The guy looked at my panel and said, “Oh yeah, I remember this house. We had to fire the electrician who wired your house because he was always showing up high.”
I had a new storm door installed through Lowe’s and the contractor they contracted to do it showed up real nice, we talked, then he went off and smoked meth and did the best fucking job I’ve ever seen.
50/50 I guess.
I bought a fridge from Lowe’s and one of the delivery guys asked to use my bathroom. When I went in there later, he had basically managed to pee on the floor instead of in the toilet. I’m a bit of a “tinkler sprinkler” myself but this was next level.
Primus sucks
I think they’re pretty good actually!
I had a gas stove installed by Lowe’s. The guys that installed it couldn’t figure out how to get the gas to stop leaking, but wouldn’t admit they had no idea what they were doing. They told me I would have to turn the gas valve off at the connection when I wasn’t using the stove
I stopped trying to explain and let them leave, because I was over it. Installed the connection myself, I was just happy I didn’t have to move it or the old one
I did call Lowe’s and let them know about it though, so that those guys wouldn’t inadvertently kill someone with their installations
50/50 for sure lol
Yeah that seems like a minor problem lol
Just install a barbeque lighter near the leak and set a timer to regularly light it and just flare off anything that has leaked since the previous flare. Then, when rebuilding after the fire, add a pressure sensor to the new setup that reduces the interval if the pressure increases beyond what it was when the interval was first calibrated.
Then, when rebuilding after the fire
Caught me off guard, lmao.
There’s high and then there’s high on meth.
Listen if all you’re doing is storm door build outs you get pretty good at it even when you’re smoking meth.
Actually I’m misremembering, he did the front door as well as the storm door.
Installed new trim and repaired some exterior wood rot he found and fixed the trim above the door so it would stop leaking lmao.
All those things were supposed to be extra charge but he just did them and that was that.
Listen if all you’re doing is storm door build outs you get pretty good at it
evenespecially when you’re smoking meth.
