Snap!

   The Sentinel  A Little Fact and a Little Fiction

Thursday morning around nine, the rain was falling like there would be no tomorrow. It was literally dark as night. Joyce and I were sitting in the dining room having coffee as it was too early for beer, unless of course it was a special occasion and try as I might, I could not come up with anything special. We had no lights on, no TV, no radio, just the two of us talking like young lovers who somehow got very much older.

We could hear the rain hitting the second story roof; it was so loud. The rain was so thick we could not see the purple leaf trees just 60 feet away. We sat wondering why we had no lights on and if it was ever going to stop raining. Then out of the darkness there was a flash from a bolt of lightning. Before the crackling sound of the lightning strike arrived there was a loud snap from something inside the house. We had no idea of what it was, but I told her it was not a good sound; something had blown out.

I got up and started checking the TV, the stereo, the computer and various lights in the dining room and the living area, but everything seemed to be fine. I knew we would discover the problem at some point so I sat down to finish my coffee. Joyce had to use her restroom and when she came back she said she had found the problem. There were no lights in her bathroom. As soon as she said that I knew it was the ground fault interrupt circuit (GFI). GFI circuits are in new bath rooms these days and ours had been remodeled right before we bought the house 22 years ago. The idea is if someone shorts out a circuit such as an electric line when they are just out of the tub and all wet, the circuit will trip and prevent electrocution. The GFI circuits can be finicky at times and kick out for no known reason. In this case I knew the reason. Joyce’s bath is on the first floor, but the GFI is in the basement below. I went down and pulled the circuit box out of the cover and saw what looked like a burn in the transformer. I went to shut off the breaker to work on it, but the electric service box on the wall had nothing marked as master bath, so it was a matter of flipping breakers off  to locate the correct one. It turned out the one I thought controlled the GFI was not the right one, but being the careful person I am; I rechecked using my voltmeter and found there was still 120 volts applied. It turned out for some unknown reason the electrician who wired the house or the contractor who remodeled it years ago tied a second breaker to the same input at the GFI.

37 years ago, when I was in the navy, I routinely worked on high voltage equipment without giving it a thought. Many of the circuits were 440 volts and would really put a tingle on a person (don’t ask me how I know that) when shocked. Now after so many years not being around high voltage, I was trembling just working with 120 volt lines. The caution is well deserved as 100 times more people are killed by a 120 volt line than by high voltage lines (except for squirrels who regularly are electrocuted by the high voltage lines coming to the step down transformers leading into each individual home).

The new GFI box was easily obtained at the local hardware store. I brought it home and took a break before starting its installation. It was after all past noon by then and I had not yet had a beer all day. My luncheon beer was so tasty, I had one more for desert as I mulled over the service box and its circuit breakers. It occurred to me that I had no idea of which breaker controlled what circuit. The instance earlier in the morning led me to believe that there was probably more than one mislabeled or changed with no label at all. Joyce and I turned on every light in the house and plugged in a string of Christmas lights into every socket in the house (luckily we had not yet put all the light strings away in the Christmas room). I was so pleased with that idea for checking each breaker; I decided we should have another drink before we started flipping breakers to see what was connected to what. After our drink and a smoke I began flipping breakers one at a time to see what happened. It was a revelation! One marked dining room was only connected to half of the dining room. One marked living room was only half of the living room and the missing half of the dining room. The other half of the living room and the computer room was on an unlabelled breaker. Half of the master bedroom was on the breaker labeled master bedroom while the other half of the master bedroom and one of the closets was on the GFI circuit for the master bath which was also unlabeled. Joyce’s studio and the outside lights were on one of two breakers labeled outside. The others were actually correct, except for number 17, which apparently connects to something we have yet find.

I installed the GFI and Joyce’s bathroom once again had electric service; so I had another beer to celebrate. As we sat we noticed the refrigerator had been running for hours, since the snap that started the day’s activity. We thought that would require a call to a service man as no amount of beer could help me figure out how to fix that. I shut the refrigerator off at the breaker, left it off for an hour and then reset the temperature control before turning the breaker back on. The refrigerator came back to life and the fridge has worked properly ever since.

It was a long day to be sure, but I have discovered if I have enough beer on hand I can get through the best of times and the worst of times. I learned that from Charles Dickens during a vision I had after a day of drinking long ago.