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blueshoefarm at gmail dot com.... and that would be how to reach me

Monday, May 13, 2013

Negotiating with a man - Part 1 - Electrical

I think I mentioned in passing I am seeing a fella.  Great guy. GREAT guy.  The only problem is that he is involved with an "independent" woman... me.  A somewhat unconventional woman leading a somewhat conventional life. 
He has a skillset that I covet.  He has 35 years of home building and renovation under his belt.  Damn.  So, when I have say -- a light in my bedroom that flickers on and off as Wilder walks in the room directly above--obviously an electrical snafu of some sort that is high on my freak-out scale, he looks at it as an easy adventure and repair he can do. 
We are still negotiating on this sort of stuff.  I have issues with - let's see for starters - being taken care of.  Being paid for.  Being bought.  Being dependent.  I think those are adequately loaded words for starters on how I feel.  So when said fella says he wants to "look at" my electrical as I head off to an appointment I think "yeah, that is fine".  Go ahead and look and tell me what you find. 
Return a few hours later and get an email communique that he added a GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) to the line so that will go off if there is a short before the breaker trips. A GFCI monitors the amount of current flowing from hot to neutral. If there is any imbalance, it trips the circuit. It is able to sense a mismatch as small as 4 or 5 milliamps, and it can react as quickly as one-thirtieth of a second. It adds a level of electrical sensitivity/safety to wires that seem to be having an issue before we figure it all out and fix it.   
OK.  There is a difference between looking and doing.  He acted. 
And I am torn, since I hate electrical problems and he just took care of a portion of it. 
The GFCI tripped last night and I went down this morning to reset it.  I was gone this weekend so did not see what he had done.  He spent 30 minutes and a lot of hand motions explaining how this all works to me over the weekend, without me seeing the actual product. So that all made sense as he told it and I expected to see the addition of the GFCI downstairs that I now needed to reset.   When I went downstairs and saw this... I just laughed.  Somehow when he explained this it was all simple.  HA. This is not simple.  None of it. 

Above is the part I laughed at.  Not the actual lovely GFCI (below the white outlet to the left of the electrical convolutions) but this box of wires.  Yup. This is why I don't (yet) touch electrical.  I have the feeling I will be soon, however...

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