Ever since we bought the island place, I’ve been worried about the electrical system. First, it sported a hazardous Stab-Lok service panel. These panels used breakers that had Underwriters Laboratories logos but which had never actually been UL certified, and were notorious for failures leading to fires. Through a series of corporate ownership changes, the perpetrators of this scam were never brought to justice and many of these ticking-time-bomb panels remain in use today.
We couldn’t really think about re-wiring the house until we had a solar plant in place. That took months, and my plan was to rewire myself. The solar folks did such a good job, though, that I hired them to do the re-wire. We left the old wiring in place, and essentially plugged in the old Stab-Lok panel to the new wiring. That put two new, UL-certified circuit breakers in line with the panel but I still worried that it was a fire hazard.
Three things were keeping me from switching over.
- the outdoor shower needs a small amount of power to ignite the propane tankless water heater, and I had forgotten to have that wired when they did the new wiring
- the landscape lights were connected to the new system, but at a point that would go away once I disconnected the old system (difficult to explain, but trust me)
- the computers and servers were still on the old system, and because the system had been wired under difficult circumstances, as resources became available, and without a master plan the wiring had become hopelessly chaotic (see photo above) and I needed to tackle it systematically to get it wired into the new system
I wanted to install power strips, not just have them rattling around on the floor, so I took some of the strips from my old mainland server farm and began attaching them to the wall.
When I got three mounted, I was able to systematically start moving wall warts and plugs onto the new strips which were, in turn, connected to the new power system. I got far enough along with that (I’ll have to finish it another day, so no “after” photos yet) I was able to migrate the remaining loose power strip to the new system. At that point, I could (literally) pull the plug and completely disconnect the old Stab-Lok panel and thus the weather-exposed Romex cables and loose wall receptacles completely. It’s all powered down now.
Next I ran a temporary line out to the shower and got it working.
While I wasn’t smart enough to remember a line for the shower, I did have a GFCI-protected plug mounted on the front porch, so was able to move the landscape lighting transformer about twelve feet over and connect to that. Our outdoor lights are working again.
The only casualty was the light fixture in the kitchen. When we bought the place, the only light fixture was a bare bulb in a ceramic socket on the kitchen wall, which you turned on and off by loosening or tightening it.
One of my first upgrades was replacing it will a cool sconce, but that won’t work again unless or until a wire it into the new system. We don’t yet know if we want to bother, as it wasn’t ever adequate kitchen lighting.
As I was putting away tools, I noticed the dryer vent cover that I’d purchased way back before I even started to get the laundry equipment working. Having the bare metal dryer vent pipe sticking out of the garage wall is unsightly, and as everything else there is now cleaned up and tied down, I thought I’d take a few minutes to cut the vent cover to length and install it.
Little things, but representing big progress.
—2p