Saturday, November 24, 2007

Electrial Issues

So, after over a year of searching I finally landed in my new pad. Back at the beginning of November, I spent a few days up here at the new place to check things out, make my list, measure rooms, and to deal with the electrician.

Why? Because one of the major sticking points with apartments on Long Island is that their electrical wiring is usually something out of the 1950s. Having one electrical outlet in each room was seen as all that was needed. And a grounded outlet was an expensive luxury (or so it seems).

So I made an agreement with the landlord that he'd hire an electrician to come out, put outlets where I specified and run at least one additional circuit up from the basement electrical panel. Which is also something that I had done back at the York PA apartment. We agreed to split the costs 50/50. That all worked fairly well and the electrcian put one additional outlet in each room and gave me a new circuit in the office area. So I have two dedicated 15/20A circuits in my office on opposite walls. Which matches what I had back in PA.

Sounds good right? I figured I was all set - until later that week when I installed a fancy-dancy Belkin surge supressor. Upon plugging it in to the nice grounded dedicated circuit, the "site wiring fault" indicator lit up. But I didn't have any sort of test equipment on me that week, so I had to just let the problem lie. So I've spent the last few weeks wondering whether I just signed a one-year lease on a place that isn't going to be suitable, or whether I could get it fixed, or even afford to get it fixed.

So after my move date during the week of Thanksgiving, I ran around with my little 3-light electrical tester. The survey was interesting. All of the outlets were marked as "correct" wiring with no issues - except for two outlets in the kitchen (old wiring) that were hot/neutral reversed.

I then called up the landlord and told him the issue. Rather then try to get him to pay for it, I said to myself "what the hell, I'll pay for it". I figure it is better for me to pay to get it done, then to spend a few years up here watching equipment go boom, or my UPS batteries to wear out quickly, or to risk shock hazard (which hot/neut reverse can lead to). But I was still sweating out the details of whether it would be a fixable issue.

The electrician listened to my summary over the phone and agreed to come out the next day. One thing that he thought it might be would be low voltage from the power company - which isn't really fixable. But since he wired up the new outlets himself, he was definitely interested in looking at it. So I dug out my little multimeter and ran around testing voltages between the two main prongs. It came out as 115-120V, so I have good voltage here (at least during the winter - I hear we get brownouts during summers). But I wasn't really surprised to see good voltage, because my UPSs are line conditioning Smart-UPS units that will light up an indicator LED on the front if they are boosting/trimming under/over voltage conditions.

He comes out, taps the outlets with his little testing meter (not exactly sure what it measures, but it could tell the "hot" wire just by touching it - in addition to reading voltages). What he found was that the voltage differential between hot/ground was only 90V or so. So he went downstairs to check the boxes and wiring and found that the ground connection had been loosened up by the plumbers doing work. Once he fixed that, the surge protector and UPSs stopped complaining about the site wiring being faulty. A nice, quick, 15 minute fix! And it didn't take long to reverse the wiring in the two kitchen outlets either.

(I know just enough electrical work to be dangerous. I can do it and I mostly know what I'm doing - but I need an electrician to check my work. In this case, with older wiring and dealing with a new landlord, I decided to let him take the 5 minutes per outlet to rewire them.)

I'm estatic today. (A) because the electrican came out on short notice (B) because it was a quick fix. Now I can start hooking up my computer equipment without worrying.

Labels: 2007, Apartment

posted by Wuphon's at 8:10 AM