Think Before You Drill

Drilling an unnecessary hole or two through a wall stud or a floor joist isn’t a big deal. Visitors will never see it, and you’re not weakening your house’s framing. This won’t help you get the job done any faster, however, especially if you drill a whole series of holes in the wrong places. Drilling the wrong hole in plaster or drywall is another matter because it requires a repair. In the worst-case scenario, let’s say you cut a four-inch-diameter hole in the ceiling with a hole saw only to discover it was in the wrong location. You would have to …

• Patch in new drywall or plaster.
• Coat the patch with finish plaster or drywall compound until it’s smooth. (In the case of a textured surface, the texturing would have to be matched.)
• Prime and paint the patch.
• Possibly paint the entire ceiling to match the patched area.

What if you’re not sure where you want to locate a light fixture? Attach some blue painter’s masking tape (this type doesn’t dry out as quickly as regular masking tape) to the proposed location and leave it up for a day or two. Apply the tape in roughly the same shape as the fixture. If it’s a hanging fixture, also attach a string the same length as the chain or light cord. You might decide you don’t want hanging lights, or you might want to relocate them.
When you’re satisfied you’ve found the right location, you can start cutting into the ceiling.

An Electrician’s Mindset

An electrical contractor has the following goals in mind when bidding, planning, and actually doing a job:

• The job must meet the customer’s requirements.
• The work must be safe, meet code, pass inspection, and be finished in a timely manner.
• The final result should be a satisfied customer and a profit for the contractor.

Your goals as a do-it-yourselfer shouldn’t be any different. You want your work to be of satisfactory quality so you can live comfortably with it rather than going crazy every time you look at a crooked light switch or receptacle. It goes without saying that your work must pass inspection, but you also want to get it finished sometime before you reach retirement age. Money-wise, you want to realize a savings from doing your own work. This can be measured in different ways. Some people keep an exact accounting of their hours and assign an hourly rate to the job versus an electrician’s labor bid. Others see it as using their off-hours productively, and anything they save is pure profit. However you measure your savings, you will have faced some challenges and learned from them, and you can’t put a dollar value on that.
By now, you’ll have drawn up a plan, calculated the loads, and gotten your permits. A plan on paper will show you where to locate a receptacle or a light fixture, but it won’t show you how to do so. For example, will you …

• Run your cable through the attic and drop it down between the wall studs?
• Consider using the basement or a crawl space for access?
• Use wire molding and run it along the surface of your baseboards?
• Remove some of the wood trim and cut into the walls behind it to avoid patching more noticeable sections of the walls? A half-hour of forethought and planning can save you hours of patching. If there’s more than one solution to the job, look at them all and decide on the best approach.

Becoming Amateur Electrician

Wiring is a nice, logical process. You want to get power from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible. Running wire or “roping” a house is mostly a matter of drilling access holes through the house’s framing (the wall studs, plates, and floor joist) and pulling electrical cable through those holes. How you carry out this nice, logical process is another matter altogether.

Like just any task in life, you can do your own electrical work the hard way or the easy way. The hard way means tearing open more walls than necessary, undoing and then redoing part of the job due to poor planning, and trying to drill holes, cut wire, and strip insulation with cheap tools. The easy way calls for planning and economizing your moves and using good tools to give you a better job and to move you through it faster. You won’t be as fast as an experienced electrician, but you’ll have the satisfaction of doing your own work and doing it well. If you’re going to be your own electrician, you need to take your role as seriously as a professional would. This means presenting any required plans to your building department when you take out a permit, knowing the code issues, using the right tools, and finding suitable suppliers for your materials and fixtures. You don’t need to invest in the same level of equipment as an electrical contractor does. After all, you’re not going to be making your living at this. You can, however, become a talented amateur whose work can be respected, even by a professional!

New Service Doesn’t Let You Off the Hook

I’m a big believer in new electrical services, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore them completely, especially if they’re tied into older, existing wiring. Breakers should trip if a circuit is overloaded, and GFCIs should shut down in the event of a ground fault, but there’s always the chance you have a piece of defective equipment. Unlikely? Sure, but it’s certainly possible.
Test your GFCIs monthly and pay attention to outlet and switch cover plates that seem too warm to the touch. If you ever smell anything burning around a receptacle, and it isn’t an individual appliance or load, shut down the circuit immediately and call an electrician. It’s worth the price of a service call for your peace of mind. For more information about electrical safety, contact one of the following agencies for printed material:

National Electrical Safety Foundation
1300 North 17th St., Suite 1847
Rosslyn, VA 22209
Phone: 703-841-3211
Fax: 703-841-3311

Electro Kindling

It’s bad enough that a faulty electrical connection overheats inside a small appliance or device. What might even be worse is the fact that the wiring is surrounded by flammable materials, often plastic casings that have replaced the metal casings from years ago. Dr. Jesse Aronstein (of aluminum wire repute) came up with the term “electro kindling” to describe the material that ignites and burns after the failure of an electrical connection. A plastic toaster will be only too happy to burn if there’s a wiring problem, while a metal one will just hang tight until you unplug it or until the wiring fries to a crisp. There have even been reports of multiple-outlet strips, icemakers, and plastic thermostats failing and subsequently igniting. Such is the price of a society that embraces plastic in all its forms. The possibility of electro kindling should reinforce the practice of unplugging your small appliances when they’re not in use.

Some Statistics on Electrical Safety

Mark Twain once said that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Trying to track down accurate figures about residential electrical fires produced quite a range of numbers. Everyone from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to various fire marshals across the country has a different figure to get the same point across: Misuse of electricity is a bad idea with sometimes incendiary results. Based on my reading, the following figures are well inside the ballpark when it comes to fires caused by electrical problems:

• Approximately 45,000 to 50,000 fires each year occur in homes because of faulty wiring, appliances, and extension cords.
• The National Center for Health estimates that approximately 760 electrocutions take place from all causes each year including 310 occurrences involving consumer products.
• More than 3,000 children under the age of 10 are treated in emergency rooms each year after inserting objects into electrical receptacles. Another 3,000 are treated for injuries associated with extension cords.
• According to the CPSC, plugs and cords are involved in close to 20 percent of all residential electrical fires each year.
• Electrical fires kill hundreds of people in their homes every year, injure thousands more, and destroy hundreds of millions of dollars in property.
• December is the most dangerous month, electrically speaking, because of holiday lighting and portable-heater use.
• Older homes are more likely to have a fire than homes built in the last 20 years.

Speaking of Kids

Children also use electricity and need to use it safely. You, as a parent (or an adult friend), need to instruct them about the hazards of yanking electrical cords out of receptacles instead of holding the plug and pulling, using a hair dryer near water or with wet hands even if you have a GFCI in the bathroom, and sticking pens into receptacles to watch them melt. In addition to your always welcome lecturing, a number of audiovisual helpers are available that could be shown at your children’s school.
Some of these films include …

• I’m No Fool with Electricity, by Disney Educational Productions. This film, according to its catalog description, somewhat implausibly shows Pinocchio and Geppetto exploring electrical safety both indoors and outdoors. Because he was made from wood, Pinocchio has the built-in advantage of being an insulator instead of an electrical conductor, at least as long as he remains dry.
• Electrical Safety from A to Zap, from Perennial Education, Inc. In this film, a mouse shows a cat how to use electricity safely, their lack of opposable thumbs notwithstanding.
• Play It Safe from HECO. This video features two children who learn safe practices around electricity. The film’s big plus so far in our list of audiovisuals is the fact that it features human beings who actually do use electricity.
• The Electric Dreams of Thomas Edison: A Guide to Indoor Electrical Safety/A Guide to Outdoor Electrical Safety, produced by the Southern California Edison utility company. In this film, students defy all the rules of logic and physics by somehow communicating with the long-dead Thomas Edison, who informs them about grounding, insulators, and conductors. They also look for outdoor electrical hazards.
• Zap Rap, from Pacific Learning Systems, Inc. Sure to appeal to the contemporary youngster, this film uses rap-style language to convey the wonders and dangers of electricity. As with most attempts to maintain students’ interest through the use of entertainment as a teaching tool, you might give your kids a quiz to see if they learned anything at all about electricity other than a few tunes.
  
• Fire in the Kitchen, from Film Communicators. This video is aimed at grades 7 through 12. There are no wooden puppets or rappin’ electrons here. This video teaches kitchen safety, including proper use of a microwave oven.
• Our Invisible Friend—Electricity. This 17-minute feature from Marcom Marketing Group also was made for grades 7 through 12. One has to wonder, of course, if any video made for seventh graders could be even remotely interesting to high school seniors.
• Safety at Home: Electricity, from AIMS Media. Geared for grades 9 through 12, a utility inspector shows careless use of electricity and the inevitable results. The inevitable results in grades 9 through 12 will be hooting and applause as actors are shocked and fried while doing things with appliances, receptacles, and plugs that a three-year-old wouldn’t consider doing.

If my experience with audiovisual presentations when I was in school is still typical of students today (some things really don’t change), I’d suggest that you take your children’s electrical education into your own hands. Take them around the house, show them how the circuit breakers and GFCIs work, even show them how to properly insert and remove a plug from a receptacle. If they’re old enough, turn the power off to a circuit, remove a switch or receptacle, and show them how it’s wired. By the time they start getting bored, you’ll have gotten the basics across.

A Lesson from Your Kids

As adults, we’re supposed to exude maturity and responsibility and set an example for our children. We try to make sure they’re fed, warm, and in bed on time. We don’t always apply this same concern to ourselves, however, and this can be dangerous when we’re working on our homes. If you’re cold, hungry, or tired, you could start making mistakes, so pay attention to your comfort level. Shaking hands, a growling stomach, and fluttering eyelids are signposts on the road telling you to pull over, put your tools down, have some lunch, and maybe catch a quick nap. We’re viewed as a sleep-deprived nation, and there are plenty of accident statistics to affirm this view. You’re not going to save any time or keep to a schedule if you have to redo some of your work later because it’s faulty.

Tool Health

Modern tools either are double-insulated or come with a ground pin in a three-pronged plug. Power tools greatly speed up just about any job, but you can’t take them for granted. Tools with frayed cords, cracked casings, or incidents of sparking should be repaired or replaced. This is especially important with heavier-duty tools if they have metal casings. The casings can become energized if there’s a short in the wiring.
Vigilance, as always, pays. Inspect your tools before starting a job. It’s far easier—and safer—to catch and tape a small tear in a drill’s power cord than to chance an injury.

Watch That Ladder

Metal ladders and overhead power lines are a bad combination. Every year, painters and tree trimmers learn this the hard way, resulting in injuries and electrocutions. Using power tools while working off a metal ladder also can be hazardous, especially during wet weather.

Electricians use wood or fiberglass stepladders and fiberglass extension ladders when they work. Fiberglass is nonconductive; wood also is an excellent insulator as long as it’s dry. Most extension ladders aimed at the homeowner market are inexpensive metal ladders. If you’re doing any serious overhead electrical work, however, a wood or fiberglass ladder is the better choice.

On Dry Ground

When it comes to electricity, dry is good and wet is bad (unless you’re the U.S. Army trying to electrocute some prehistoric swamp creature in a cheesy, 1950s monster movie). Never stand in a puddle or on damp ground when working on your electrical
system. Always find a dry piece of wood or another insulating material to stand on
while working. If you must work during wet weather, wear thick-soled rubber boots.
Better yet, wait for a dry day (always an iffy situation here in the Northwest, unfortunately).