September 16, 2006
Important safety tip
It is possible for a light fixture to be "hot," even when its switch is off, and the lamp is not lit. This is because you can wire the fixture so that the switch turns the light off by interrupting the hot wire (correct) or by interrupting the grounded wire (bad thing, but not unknown, especially in older houses). The grounded wire is "downstream" from the light fixture.
This morning a bulb broke off, leaving its its base in one of our kitchen lights. I did the right thing, and tested it before poking my pliers in. Good move, John! You earned your pay today. It was hot.
When in doubt, just turn the circuit-breaker off...
Posted by John Weidner at September 16, 2006 07:29 AMAnd for God's sake, re-wire the circuit!!
Posted by: Hale Adams at September 16, 2006 08:50 PMNot easy to do. It's old ball and tube wiring, and the two wires don't run together, and I don't even know where the hot wire is. And running a new cable from switch to fixture would be messy.
Oh well. It's now on the list. The long long list...
Posted by: John Weidner at September 16, 2006 08:59 PMOoooh, scary. (wince)
Been there, done a little bit of that.
My father's parents' house, an early Victorian, had been wired for electricity circa WWI, and had been rewired in the late '50s, but there were still bits of the old post-and-tube wiring still in service in places the electricians hadn't been able get to (or didn't dare go to-- fragile plasterwork).
One day, about 20 years ago, I had to pull down a light fixture to rewire it, and came face-to-face with wiring encased in plasterwork. The insulation on the wires was so crumbly you could breathe on it wrong and watch it fall apart. Dad said not to worry about it-- it would last longer than he would-- so I wire-nutted the re-wired fixture to the old wiring.
Dad was right. The wiring's still there, and he's gone. (shakes head, wonders what time-bomb some owner of 33 Maple St. is going to discover in AD 2057......)
Posted by: Hale Adams at September 17, 2006 08:06 AMThankfully, I've never had a bulb break off in something wired into the wall, so I've always been able to unplug the sucker.
As for rewirinig, my husband helped his dad rewire their 1920s house when he was a kid (partly so they'd have more than one outlet per room, but also because, well, 1920s wiring.) The part that impresses me the most is that they rewired the house without once cutting through the plaster. That's tricky.
Posted by: B. Durbin at September 17, 2006 04:23 PM
