Federated Handy People

The customer and first-time homeowner wanted to learn all about electrical work.

It seems that for most people, working on residential electrical things is much more frightful than a professional-grade Halloween “House of Horrors”. For those of us that understand electrical switching equipment, and how the power flows through the network, it’s not too troubling. Pro’s manage their risk with things like Lock-Outs where they go the extra length to make sure the power stays off while they are servicing things.

On this job, we were lucky to have a main service switch outside the home at the electric meter which powered down the sub-panel in the home as well as the outdoor Air-Conditioning unit.

With this main breaker off, we were safe to do anything we pleased inside without any chance of an electrical accident.

The area around the fuse box was carefully prepped by surgically removing a minimum amount of the Lath & Plaster using a shallow depth cutting device so as to explore which direction the service wires were heading. In the O.J.T. videos below, we add the new main grounding wire to the system and swap out the fuse box with a breaker switch panel.

Our biggest worry now was that it would take us so long to get the job done that the house would chill to freezing. Without a Crystal Ball to look into, nobody really knows how long a job will take; you have to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Our backstop was the wood-burning fireplace and a pile of wood.

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Now we just had to patch the wall back over. With a couple jobber sized panels at the ready, we decided to make this an easy-to-remove wall covering. They have many future plans where additional wiring may be done to enhance their home life experience, so we made sure that those future jobs would go well.

It’s all over but the painting now.