Electricity; a fickle mistress indeed

It all started on Saturday morning as an attempt to replace the light fixture in our bathroom, add an outlet next to the medicine cabinet, and add a GFCI outlet to the circuit so we wouldn't fry ourselves on the light switch that sits just 2 or 3 inches beyond the shower curtain. By 9 p.m. Sunday night, I had replace nearly everything on the circuit (from the breaker to the last receptacle) with updated wiring, outlets, and so on. Our house was built in 1935, and it has good ol' fashioned knob and tube wiring, which isn't exactly up to code these days. It's also not that much fun to work with.

If you know anything about electrical work, you know that modern wiring involves two or more wires (plus a ground wire) that all run together in a nifty little sheath. At least one of the wires is "hot" and one other wire is "neutral." Thus, the ingredients for a safe, complete circuit are always together. Not so with knob and tube. In a K&T setup, the hot wire may run 12 inches or more away from the neutral wire, and often times no neutral will be around at all. Then, several "hots" will all come back on the same neutral. While this technically works very well from a purely theoretical physics classroom perspective, it is more than enough to drive a novice do-it-yourselfer to the point of saying "Raca" to the man who devised this devilish wiring scheme. Like I said, all I wanted to do was put in a stinkin' light and a GFCI outlet.

I ended up tearing all of the old wiring out and replacing it with romex, and I can attest to just how stubborn those old knobs can be. During more than one pull, the wire actually gave out before pulling loose of the knob(s) it was fastened to.

Like most home improvement projects, this one came with its own dose of irony. One of the reasons I'm so intent on replacing the old wiring is for safety. Turns out the insulation on K&T systems becomes brittle with time, and it can fall off, or even be chewed off by rodents. And, when you get bare wire running through a house you can very quickly end up with charred wire sitting in a pile of ashes.

So, as I replaced what seemed like miles of old, brittle wire, all in the name of safety, I nearly electrocuted myself. I do have a voltage tester, but it fits very comfortably in my pocket, where it resides undesturbed for most of my wiring projects. Thinking that the breaker had been turned off, I inspected my progress, climbed onto my aluminum work platform, grabbed the wire I wanted to cut, and BOOM. My wire cutters produced a large orange ball of ozone about four inches from my nose, the lights dimmed, and the circuit breaker blew. The rubber handles on my cutters protected me from experiencing any of the current first hand, but not without any damage. When I picked up my cutters, they had two large scorch marks on them, each with a shiny melted-metal intent in the middle of it.

If anyone's looking for any last-minute Valentine's Day gift ideas for me, I might suggest the wire cutters with a built-in voltage sensor in them (pictured to the left), available from Amazon for just $24.97.