Best Of

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.

my Local Toyota dealer has those large super fast overhead door openers

It seems a months worth of fuel cost would pay for that setup

I’ll bet the company that manufacturers those has some fuel saving data

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.

" discuss radiant loop layout " In the slab I assume ?

" the conveyor " is secured to what ? An if they decide to move it ?

Air Curtain ?

Sounds like they want to put themselves out of business with heating fuel costs.

I think they are nuts to think they can keep the doors open and still maintain temp, what a fuel hog. So much for energy savings and going green.

They better have a lot of good scrap to sell to pay the fuel bill.

Air curtains are a good idea.

At my old shop which was 100,000 square feet we had RT units for heat and Ac in the shop. When the units were 20 years old and the HXs were failing (the AC was ok) we installed gas fired radiant overhead.

The difference was amazing. We had 10 x 10 garage doors and they got opened in the morning and all the trucks were moved out and the door was closed. This may have taken 1/2 hour to move the trucks and the place would be freezing by then

With the RTUs it would take an hour to recover on a cold day. With the gas radiant as soon as the door shut the space was back to temp because the slab was a giant radiator.

Open all day doesn't seem feasible to me.

I don't know how long fast opening doors will hold up in a scrap yard environment, probably get smashed in a week.

A good idea though.

MU air heaters may help to pressurize the building to keep cold air out. have it discharge right at the door.

no matter what they do it will be an energy pig.

For me it was working in office spaces with lift out ceiling panels. You pop a tile measure something or do some work move the ladder do some work move the ladder etc. etc.

At the end of the day you pop all the panels back in, then you find out you missing half your tools that are in the ceiling and don't know where they are.

but i found some good stuff others left behind as well.

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.