Best Of

I had the certificate framed and it's hanging on the wall.

At one time I had about 12 licenses in different states, electrical, oil burner, gas fitting, sheet metal etc

But unfortunately, now licenses mean you don't know anything. Its becoming a joke. being a licensed electrician used to mean something back in the day. now it means your a hack.

I feel bad for HO calling contractors who not only pay contractors huge $$$ but the work is so shoddy. I have been on the other side for 50 years but I can't blame any HO for doing his own work now.

Long story short, a relative called me who I had re-wired their 1915 house in the early 80s, they have had electricians their doing work over the years since then and have a few issues. One issue is a nasty dirt floor damp crawl space. The other one is very shallow old-time framing that requires the use of shallow electrical boxes with limited space.

So even though I don't really do any "real" work anymore I was curious to take a look. I still have my electrical license and go to the update classes (don't know why).

What I found:

Electrician added new kitchen lights and an outdoor spotlight and wired them to the 20 amp kitchen small appliance branch circuit which has never been ok.

He mounted old work metal boxes by driving sheet rock screws though the back (there's 3/4 wood paneling on the other side of the wall so i am ok with that) but he "grounded" the box by wrapping the wire around the sheetrock screw. NG.

One of the shallow wall receptacle boxes I had installed back in the 80s he extended the circuit coming out of the box. The box is not large enough for the added wire and wire nuts so he hammered the receptacle in to the box crushing the wires which eventually shorted.

He added an arc fault circuit breaker to the panel for an existing circuit that he extended. When I looked inside the panel the neutral pigtail was not connected to the neutral bar. This should have left the circuit with no neutral but yet I had 120 on the breaker and the circuit worked.

Turns out the circuit has the neutral and ground shorted together somewhere. I ran out of time to track that down, but I disconnected that portion of the circuit (with the short) hooked up the AFCI breaker correctly and the breaker and the rest of the circuit is fine.

Because of the shallow boxes and wire fill problems with the smaller boxes you end up with more junction boxes in the crawl space than you would like. Most electricians don't want any part of a crawl space and I don't blame them being in the cobwebs, bent over, the damp dirt floor, rocks, rubble, broken glass tracing wire and a lot of boxes is tough. The difference is they will guess at things, and I won't.

I didn't like it when I rewired it when I was 28

I still didn't like it today at 72 but i spent the afternoon down there.

All the original stuff I did is pretty good. Every problem is where someone hacked things up when adding things like trying to add GFCI receptacles into boxes not large enough

Hope I can get out of bed tomorrow.

My curiosity is now satisfied.

Sounds like they need to hire an engineer to assume the responsibility of the design and the outcome. I would not take on the responsibility of the design.

Tell them straight up, it's not going to work. They need to figure out a different strategy for material handling. Without knowing the process, I can't really offer suggestions. If they insist on trying to heat a 5k sf building with a 22x18 door hanging wide open, walk away. Working for idiots is financially risky and you won't get any satisfaction.

Thanks to our friend Steve for sharing this piece of history with us!