Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Good morning crew,

Every night, when I pull up to my garage and hit the garage door opener, I say a little prayer and plead with the fickle finger of luck that the power will still be on.

After putting in just a grueling weekend two weeks ago to replace 30 feet of electrical conduit that was buried in my backyard, I have been waiting in dreadful fear that my repair will fail.

Granted, I had two friends who are fairly well-experienced in electrical work helping me, but if something goes wrong with the repair it is on me. There is no contractor I can call and say, 'You need to get your crew back out here and fix this problem.'

The crew is me, and I will NOT be happy if I have to pull those God-forsaken shovels out and dig up about 650 cubic feet of hard-packed dirt and clay again.

Of course, if a problem does crop up it probably wouldn't be with the conduit. I buried what they call rigid conduit which is made from a heavy gauge galvanized steel. The stuff won't rust and it doesn't flex very easily.

And I buried it a foot-and-a-half deep, too. I didn't necessarily want to, but my friend Val insisted. He said it was 'code'. I'm not sure what the code is, but that conduit is way down there now!

Whatever brain-damaged monkey installed the original conduit 20 or 30 or 40 years ago apparently didn't know what code is either. Because I found the original stuff only about 10 or 12 inches down and discovered he had used what they call thin wall conduit or EMT (Electrical Metallic Tubing). This stuff is designed for use inside buildings and is not corrosion resistant.

Basically, it was just a three-quarter-inch wide strip of rust running through the dirt with some fragments of wires in it. That was why, when I first tried to pull the wires out by hand I thought they were just buried in dirt. There was really no conduit left.

No, if there is a problem it will probably be with the rest of the wiring. Once I had new wires running into the garage I had to connect them to the existing wiring, and that looked like a bunch of spaghetti sticking out of the various receptacle and junction boxes.

Val and I must have spent four hours wiring things together one way and then another. First the receptacles would work, but the lights wouldn't. Then the receptacles AND the lights worked, but the garage door wouldn't.

Once we tried simply twisting all of the black wires together and ended up popping the breaker with a little 'Zzzap!' That was exciting.

The wife spent her entire afternoon sitting by the back door waiting for me to yell 'power on' or 'power off' so she could run down the stairs and flip the breaker switch.

Eventually we came upon the right combination to get power to everything without shorting out the entire house, but I think it was more luck than anything else. Which is why I cross my fingers every time I flip a switch or push a button in the garage.

If I have to do it all over again I think it would be easier to gut the garage and start from the beginning.

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

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***
"On the new season of 'Sesame Street,' Cookie Monster will do a segment where he urges kids to eat healthy. The segment ends with Cookie Monster looking off-camera and asking, 'Now you let Cookie Monster's wife and kids go?'" -Conan O'Brien

***
"A man was arrested at Denver International Airport yesterday for running onto the tarmac to try and stop a plane after he missed his flight on the way to his high school reunion. He was heard screaming after the plane, 'But I lost all the weight!'" -Seth Meyers

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"The federal government has a new plan that will let people send texts to 911. Yeah, it's a little frustrating when you try to text, 'Burglar! Please hurry!,' and it auto-corrects to, 'Burger, please. Hungry.'" -Jimmy Fallon

***
A police officer called the station on his radio.

"I have a bit of a problem here. An old lady just shot her husband for stepping on the floor she just mopped."

"What's the problem?" came the response. "Have you arrested the woman yet?"

"Not yet. The floor's still wet."


*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
A man sees a job ad posted on a construction site, "Handy man wanted; apply within."

So he does and speaks to the foreman.

"Can you drive a Bobcat?" the foreman asks.

"No."

"Can you plaster?"

"No."

"Have you ever done any carpentry?"

"No."

"If you don't mind me asking," says the foreman, "what's so handy about you?"

"Well, I only live about five minutes down the road..."