Duck Pond Redneckery


Ok so I've just been informed that Mrs. Duck's parents house has been without power since the storm the other night that I slept through.

I have half a tree down in my front yard. I've been too lazy to take the carb apart on my chain saw to clean out the old gas & I don't think my tractor can drag it to the burn pile in one piece. Well maybe. But it'll tear up the lawn. Not that I care about tearing up the lawn. :rolleyes:


Mrs. Duck's brother, wife & toddler live with their parents. The parents are down south at their vacation home because Mrs. Duck's step-mom needs her CPAP machine & I guess 600 miles worth of gas (round trip) is cheaper than a hotel, and easier than picking up the phone & borrowing a generator. :rolleyes:

But the toddler is sick & fussy.

Sarah's brother & 3 friends in the neighborhood have been sharing a 2500 watt Briggs & Stratton generator they've been using to keep their refrigerators cold. Every few hours they move it to a different house.


Mine hasn't been started in over a year. I carried it to the barn with the tractor because I was fully expecting to have to clean out the carb. But no. Full choke, turned on the gas valve, let it sit for 5 seconds, pulled the rope once & it started right up. It won't run unless it's on 50% choke though, and there's no friggin' air/fuel mixture screw on it. WTF. A 10 HP Briggs engine & it has no freakin' adjustable jets. The only adjustment is for the idle set-screw which it doesn't even need because it's a generator & has no throttle control. Just a governor. It never idles unless you hold your finger on it.



I asked her brother if the house has a master shutoff switch. He sent me this pic & said "this is what I'm looking at".


I'm hoping those big fat wires in the lower right of the panel come straight out of that separate breaker box below it. That looks like a 100 amp master breaker in that little box. If that's the case, then I'll be able to power up that whole house by back-feeding the 240 outlet for the dryer.

20140702_133634.webp

I sent him a text asking if that's the master switch below it or if it's a sub-panel for the garage & he didn't know. I asked him if he can follow those big fat wires that supply the bus bars & see if they go to that lower box & he replied "uhhhh.........".

Tried calling his dad but just like both of my parents, he's too old & senile to know how to operate a cell phone.
 
Back home. The power company said they weren't expecting to have the power restored til tomorrow night.

I drove 40 miles, spent about an hour trying to figure out the best "TEMPORARY" way to hook up the generator. I wanted to simply leave two 120 volt female extension cord ends hanging out of the panel. One for each hot. Then use the 120 outlets on my generator, one for each hot. That way when the power comes back on they can just un-plug it & shut off the generator & next time I'm there I can remove the short cords.

All the wire nuts had too many wires under them to add an extra, and all the screw heads on the breakers already had wires under them & they're not the type that are designed for two wires.

So I went out to the garage figuring I'll just back-feed both 120 volt circuits in there, so it'll back-feed to both hots in the house & run everything. First I poked around with my tester to check for continuity. I could not find two outlets that did not have continuity between the hots.

So I looked inside it's 30 amp dual circuit fuse box to figure out WTF was going on.

The feeder from the house has a black, white & a red.

Some imbecile has the white (common) hooked to one of the hots. The red (secondary hot) is hooked to the common bus bar. And the black (primary hot) is correctly hooked up to one of the hots.

I called Sarah's brother Eric & asked who the hell wired up this garage & he said his uncle Kenny "upgraded" the house to 100 amp service in the 1990's. Oh yeah, .. good ole' Uncle Kenny. I've seen his wiring work at their dad's cabin in southern Illinois. Same kind of horse shit.

Just like the house I grew up in 3 blocks away from there, this house used to be 60 amps with four 15 amp fused circuits in that EVERYBODY puts 30 amp fuses in. Kenny simply replaced the panel with a breaker box. He also wired up the garage & a crappy addition that they later decided to tear down but leave the roof so now it's like a porch except with 2x4 wall studs spaced randomly every 16 to 24 inches & not even close to parallel or plumb.... I'm guessing Kenny was involved in the framing for that addition too...

The garage is fed with one of those flat ribbon type underground feeders coming in from the house. 12-3 solid. Inside the house, I could not find the other end of that feeder. So somewhere behind the drywall it makes the swap. That's illegal as hell. All connections have to be inside a box, and the box cannot be placed behind drywall.

So I was gonna say screw the garage & just make two 120 volt single-phase extension cords with male plugs on each end & I was going to back-feed one outlet in the house, with all the breakers ON but the master OFF, then walk around the house checking all the outlets until I found one that wasn't working, and hook the other double-male-ended extension cord to it so the whole house would be powered up. It's a horse-shit way of doing it but it's the only way I know it'll work that won't be hard for them to understand how to disconnect.

So I took my generator out of the van.

This is a 5500/8500 watt generator with a 10 HP engine & about 5 gallons of gas in it. I don't know how heavy it is, but it's friggin' heavy. I used the tractor as a forklift to load it in the van. VERY carefully because the tractor's brakes don't work.

0702141445.webp

I was hoping Sarah's brother would be there to help me unload it, but no. He was at work. 2nd shift. Used to be 3rd.

So I just man-handled it & set it down & rolled it over by the back door & was gonna back-feed one of the porch outlets & walk around the house seeing what outlets worked & which didn't.

Right as I was about to fire it up, their neighbor came walking up the driveway & said their power was back on.

:gun3:


So then I had to get that damn generator back up into the van by myself.

:violin:

I got it in there though.
 
Before I left, just for the hell of it I poked around the garage sub-panel & the house panel with my voltmeter with everything live & powered up from the utility.

I found a copper ground rod, a 3 lb hammer & a C-clamp in the garage. I pounded the ground rod in about 2 feet & clamped a bare copper wire to it that I found rolled up in the garage so I could have an established ground to work with. Not good enough for a permanent installation but as wet as the dirt is, it's good enough for my purpose. I got zero volts between the red hot coming in from the house to the garage, and my temporary jury-rigged ground rod. I got 119 volts from the black, and 119 volts from the white.

White is supposed to be the common. In this case, the red was the common.

Then get this, ... just going from the white to the black, I got nothing. Zero volts. But either one would give me 119 volts to ground. There should have been 238 volts between those two hots. But no. That means they're both wired to the same bus bar in the house panel, or there's only one wire but it splits into two at some point.

Inside the house, I checked across the two hots coming in from that master switch & got 238 volts. From either one to the common, I got 119 volts. So at least that part is correct.

In the house, the common bar had white and red wires connected to it, and some of the breakers had whites coming off of them.

White = common
Black = hot
Red = secondary hot, ONLY when two hots are in the same conduit or Romex cable.

Eric told me the dryer was electric. It's not, it's gas. I unplugged the 120 volt power cord that runs it's motor & checked it.

The short slot is supposed to be hot, big slot is common, and the round hole is the ground. The VERY FIRST outlet I checked, was that dryer outlet and the big slot has 119 volts between it and the ground (the copper ground rod I put in the dirt next to the garage, .. there are no ground wires anywhere in this house. It wasn't required when the house was originally wired up.) Zero volts from the short slot to the ground. So I pulled the cover plate off. WHITE wire connected to the side with the big slot (correct) was giving me 119 volts (wrong) so I know that white wire is hooked up wrong in the panel. I figured out which one it was, it was the first "white wire" breaker I flipped off. So I was thinking about switching the two but said the hell with it.

I started to check other circuits but I noticed Eric's wife had just put on a movie so the toddler would stop whining & I didn't want to be turning circuits off. Especially since it's satellite & those receivers take forever to power up.


So I just got in the van & left.


I called Eric & told him how half the shit is backwards in that house & that the garage CAN be wired for 240 if we simply switch some wires around but I told him about the feeder switching over to round Romex somewhere in the wall & he said he's been planning on getting somebody to fix that shit because he's buying that house from his dad & he can't get an FHA loan without the wiring passing inspection.


I told him next time he's home & there are no women around to whine about the power being turned on and off randomly all day long, that I'll go over there & fix all that shit & bring it all up to code. The outlets in the house won't be grounded because as long as we don't fuck with them, they'll be grandfathered but at least I'll have everything correct at the panel the way it should be. And we're gonna rip out the drywall until I find where that feeder changes over to the Romex.

It would NOT surprise me to find nothing but 3 wire nuts, not even a junction box.

Oh and that back porch that used to be an addition, ... that's getting torn down. There's no way in hell that'll pass inspection for an FHA loan.

And the indoor-type outlet box, with an indoor-type outlet & cover plate attached to a pressure-treated post in the front yard that's only about 1 foot in the ground with no concrete, with exposed indoor-type Romex going underground & into the house through a hole in the vinyl siding, ... that's gotta come out too. :rolleyes:
 
Duck said:
Ok so I've just been informed that Mrs. Duck's parents house has been without power since the storm the other night that I slept through.

I have half a tree down in my front yard. I've been too lazy to take the carb apart on my chain saw to clean out the old gas & I don't think my tractor can drag it to the burn pile in one piece. Well maybe. But it'll tear up the lawn. Not that I care about tearing up the lawn. :rolleyes:


Mrs. Duck's brother, wife & toddler live with their parents. The parents are down south at their vacation home because Mrs. Duck's step-mom needs her CPAP machine & I guess 600 miles worth of gas (round trip) is cheaper than a hotel, and easier than picking up the phone & borrowing a generator. :rolleyes:

But the toddler is sick & fussy.

Sarah's brother & 3 friends in the neighborhood have been sharing a 2500 watt Briggs & Stratton generator they've been using to keep their refrigerators cold. Every few hours they move it to a different house.


Mine hasn't been started in over a year. I carried it to the barn with the tractor because I was fully expecting to have to clean out the carb. But no. Full choke, turned on the gas valve, let it sit for 5 seconds, pulled the rope once & it started right up. It won't run unless it's on 50% choke though, and there's no friggin' air/fuel mixture screw on it. WTF. A 10 HP Briggs engine & it has no freakin' adjustable jets. The only adjustment is for the idle set-screw which it doesn't even need because it's a generator & has no throttle control. Just a governor. It never idles unless you hold your finger on it.



I asked her brother if the house has a master shutoff switch. He sent me this pic & said "this is what I'm looking at".


I'm hoping those big fat wires in the lower right of the panel come straight out of that separate breaker box below it. That looks like a 100 amp master breaker in that little box. If that's the case, then I'll be able to power up that whole house by back-feeding the 240 outlet for the dryer.

View attachment 27983

I sent him a text asking if that's the master switch below it or if it's a sub-panel for the garage & he didn't know. I asked him if he can follow those big fat wires that supply the bus bars & see if they go to that lower box & he replied "uhhhh.........".

Tried calling his dad but just like both of my parents, he's too old & senile to know how to operate a cell phone.
Click to expand...
that looks like a fugging mess I wouldn't mess with that
 
Injun said:
I can sum it up better:

Idiot Uncle Kenny rigged the wiring.
Click to expand...
That doesn't even begin to describe the depths of that guy's stupidity.

Being unable to wire up a breaker panel in a house does not make a person stupid.

Wiring it up anyway, when you don't know what you're doing, is what makes a person stupid.

He was probably like "It's AC, so it doesn't matter, there's no positive & negative".

Bullshit, .. if a house is wired up correctly, you can wrap a bare copper wire around your tongue & shove it into the longer of the two vertical slots in an outlet while holding onto a grounded pipe & nothing will happen. The common (also called "neutral") IS the ground. The only reason they have an extra ground wire these days is to protect people from IDIOTS who wire shit up wrong & then plug in 50 year old toaster.

PTP_Electrical_Outlet_Probl.webp

A lot of older appliances are wired up with the whole metal body of the appliance grounded to the white wire.

So if the outlet is wired wrong & the black wire is connected to the side with the taller slots, you'll get fried if you touch any of the metal parts on an older appliance that has it's white wire grounded to the sheet metal.
 
A little kid and a fork works!

240 volts here is wired somehow, All I've ever worried about when changing plugs is the wire from the old plug goes to the same blade on the new plug.

There're so many different colours of insulation, black/green/brown, red/blue/green, orange/yellow/green. And green isn't always earth... Sometimes it's neutral.

So I just put them where they came from, just in a new plug, and trust the electrician that wired it up in the first place got it right.
 
Kiwi303 said:
A little kid and a fork works!

240 volts here is wired somehow, All I've ever worried about when changing plugs is the wire from the old plug goes to the same blade on the new plug.

There're so many different colours of insulation, black/green/brown, red/blue/green, orange/yellow/green. And green isn't always earth... Sometimes it's neutral.

So I just put them where they came from, just in a new plug, and trust the electrician that wired it up in the first place got it right.
Click to expand...
In standard residential wiring here we just have black & white, sometimes red, and the ground is either bare copper or green insulation.

Our primary voltage is 110-125 volts (depending on the age of the nearest transformer) and 220-240 is only used for large appliances like central air conditioners, electric stoves, water heaters, well pumps and big garage tools like shop grade air compressors & welders.

220-240 here is achieved by using the other "hot" instead of a common. Except some electric motors use the common too.
And my 240 volt water heater is not really 240. It just uses both hots. It has two 120 volt heating elements but they each get their own hot.
 

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