Matt Shelton

The fun homeownership never ends. And why should it? I know not.

After doing a bunch of work in the kitchen this past November, we ran into one snag: the new stove would not sit flush against the wall. This wall happens to be an exterior wall; with almost any brick house, there’s not a lot of room behind the drywall and this is no exception. As a result, the power receptacle, which fit snugly underneath the previous stove, causes the new one (with two ovens, hence the clearance difference) to sit out about 3 inches.

This doesn’t bother me one bit, it does, however, annoy my wife. And as everyone knows, low WAF is bad. She’ll deal with it fine in the short term, but I know that at some point I’m either going to have to figure out how to make that stove sit against the wall, or order a really thick piece of matching backsplash to fill the gap.

I had a couple of hours to kill on this cool and windy President’s Day, so I started disassembling the non-functional kitchen in our finished basement. The functional main level kitchen is right above it, and the stove wiring runs down into the basement, so to get a good look at it, I had to take out a couple of wall mounted cabinets. Who doesn’t like demolition? Nobody. Everyone likes taking things apart.

I had previously noted that the 6 gauge wiring from my panel to the stove dipped down below the top of the exposed drywall in the basement, and then reappeared going straight up a few inches back. This made no sense to me unless there was a junction of some kind in the wall, and I was certain that couldn’t be up to code. I filed this mentally, and didn’t think about it again until today… Two cabinets into my demolition, I notice this perfectly lovely portal in the wall:

A sudden memory flash… what could possibly be in there?

Yep.

Apparently, when you “upgrade the wiring” in a house, and some of the circuits are too short, or too hard to get to, you can put a big ol’ junction box in the wall to marry old wiring to new wiring. I’m certain that you’re supposed to make sure that said junction box is accessible, but perhaps whomever did the wiring didn’t communicate that to the same people who put a not-to-code kitchen in the basement of this house?

Maybe?

Of note, this did answer my question as to where my doorbell transformer was located. Two mysteries solved!

geek life home, wiring

Things I read, liked and bookmarked in the last 24 hours:

• Our Best Bites: Single Serving Pie in a Jar I like pie, and what could be better than single-serve pie?
• Build A Book Nest This looks like a cute idea for a "books I’m reading" bookshelf that wouldn’t be too hard to build.
• Cool Tools: Toto Eco Drake I’ll have to remember this one for whenever I can cobble together the money to remodel our bathroom. This looks like a smart way to get a strong flush using less water.

links baking, bathroom, books, delicious, google reader, home, links, pie, snacks, to-do, toilet, woodworking

When my wife and I bought our home, we knew that at some point, there would be semi-serious things we’d want to change about it. The yard, for instance, was a huge sore spot. If you followed me on twitter last spring, you’d know that the initial work we did involved tilling, which really sucked, and that was only for the first 1000 square feet. Of an acre.

Yeah. We hired people with really, really big machines to clear the rest.

Anyway, having (thankfully) already passed that milestone, the attention turned to the kitchen. Our stove is of normal size, but it’s primary burner is flaky to the point of useless, it has a huge exhaust fan that sticks out too far and too low. The oven has but a single rack, and no matter who I ask, there seem to be no replacement racks. So, guess what we’re replacing first? Yes, that’s right: The dishwasher.

Er, no, wait. The stove. Right, the stove.

The existing stove is on a 40A/240V, 2-pole circuit. This is about as normal as you can get for an electric range, though I seriously doubt we ever pull more than 20-25 Amps, save maybe when pre-heating the oven to broil. The new stove, of course, needs a 50 Amp circuit. I know enough about electrical wiring to know that I can probably pull off replacing the breaker myself. Buying the right one, on the other hand, well that’s another story.

My electrical panel is a standard-size Siemens panel for a 200 Amp service. I even have a couple of empty breaker bays for expansion, should I need to do so. I figured, Siemens is a well-known brand, there have to be breakers for it at Lowe’s, except that I was wrong. I phoned the family electric guru and it was suggested that I buy a Square-D breaker. It should fit.

I love the word “should”. See, the breaker does fit, but it violates electric code to mis-match your breaker. (Nice corner on the market each of these electrical companies have, you see.) While I don’t really care all that much about electric code when it comes to something that isn’t actually risky, I do care when it comes to selling my house some day. I’d prefer to not do this twice.

All of my existing breakers are either Westinghouse or Siemens. Turns out that Siemens AG licensed or something-ed their residential power generation business to Westinghouse Electric at some point, and in 1994, Westinghouse sold its electrical controls business to Eaton, who markets their home products under the name Cutler-Hammer. Which is only sold at Home Depot.

All of this, by the way, is the real reason that people spend money on electricians. Not the danger, mind you, just to avoid standing in the electrical aisle looking like an idiot until a random electrician walks by and says “You’re in the wrong store. Go to Home Depot.” and then runs away before the Lowe’s employees catch him.

I wrote this about two months ago and completely forgot about it. Oops. Since then, we’ve done way more to this kitchen than I had originally intended at the time. I’m certain that a future buyer will be very happy with the choices we’ve made, but really what I care about now is that the WAF is very high.

geek life electricity, home, wiring

My house is an odd mix of cabling oddness. The previous owners had both digital cable (for Internet service) and two satellite dishes, split ~9 ways (for hdtv). They also, at some point, had Verizon FIOS installed with both a phone and ethernet drop installed to this little nook in the living room. There is an incredible nest of coax cable in the attic, which I plan to (mostly) rip out one of these days.

The two telco drops from that original FIOS install were actually fairly accessible in the attic, so when I had FIOS installed, I asked the tech to patch in that phone line, but leave the ethernet alone since I wanted to run cat6 throughout the entire house. The FIOS tech was really amiable and creative, so he fished the coax run from the fiber patch area in the garage, up the wall, across my attic and down an existing attic to basement opening in to the storage room where my router lives. I meant to ask him to pull an extra lead down so that I could re-use the same drop some day, but I had to do something new-homeowner-ish while he was installing it, and I forgot.

We also put a desk in that little living room nook. It’s my wife’s primary work space; the household iMac and our home phone share it. Our iMac has been chugging along on our 802.11g network, but that has several throughput-releated downsides since all of our media data (music, tv, movies, etc.) live on a network share. My two other machines, both in the basement, were far easier to patch (drop ceilings, easy access to both rooms, etc.)

This week I have an abnormal amount of personal project time, so I thought one of my first tasks should be to see if I could somehow get this ethernet drop added to our wired network. Figuring I could somehow use the same route our FIOS tech used, I came up with three :

1. Pull the coax back up to the attic with an attached lead, attach the cat 5, pull it back down. This has some risk… if the lead breaks or detaches when I’m pulling it up, I’m boinked.
2. Try to drop the cable using the existing opening. This has a little risk also, but I don’t lose anything by trying.
3. Bore another hole into the “floor” of the attic and the “ceiling” of the basement next to the existing one. Risk? Oh gosh, I can’t imagine it’d be a bad idea boring a hole right next to my primary power conduit for the house. Very little risk. *facepalm*

Sarcasm aside, I really like option 3. It gives me an excuse to create wiring capacity in my wall for later running about a half-dozen sets of 2xcat6/1xcoax, which has been the eventual plan. From my attic, though, it’s really hard to tell what’s a couple of inches to each side of the existing hole through several layers of ceiling/floor boards. The conduit is 2 inches in diameter, and the hole is about 2.5 inches wide. With the existing coax in there already, I couldn’t shine any discernible light source either upwards or downwards in a way which gave me a clear view of the interior of the run. It’s too bad, too, because it sure would be easier long-term to snake some 2 inch flex conduit up through a new set of holes and be done with it.

Option 2, then, seemed like the interim winner. I crawled over to the conduit run the other day and saw that I could see about 1/4 of an inch of light at the bottom of the run in the basement, if I stared hard enough. That was enough to motivate me to take a shot at it, so I set out to tackle the next problem, how to guide the wire down without it curling, wire fish being out of the question from a power-conduit-integrity perspective.

I MacGuyver’d myself a lead:

1. Drinking straw split down the middle
2. Metal countersink punch, taped mostly inside one end of the straw with electrical tape
3. Cat 5 + nylon twine taped in the other side

I ran the cable down and when I felt it stop pulling (and could kinda see it against the hole in the basement, I think maybe) I guessed that I had hit the end of the run. The resulting view from the basement was promising: I could see the end of my lead and pulled it through the rest of the way using a very long pair of needlenose pliers.

Cable terminated, I drafted this post on my wired mac, enjoying media throughput at about 4-6x stronger than it was on the WLAN (which doesn’t make mathematical sense, but several file copy tests tell me to shut up). I’ll have to revisit my ideas for cabling the entire house. For now I’m considering using what I have right now as-is, and putting a punchdown block with a cable split, phone breakout and a gigabit switch up in the attic so that I can minimize the work required to traverse the floors. It means I’m splitting cable twice rather than once, which breaks a geek rule or two, but I’ll have to move on.

After this experience went so well, and I couldn’t see the shadow of the drop swaying much from the basement light source, I think the run’s location itself is pure luck – it’s probably a 3-4 inch-wide space in an interor wall between studs either near a wall’s end or a corner. I don’t think option #3 up there is even feasible in the same spot. There are probably other spots I could do this, but to make myself confident that it’s possible, I’d really need to tear out pieces of one of the first floor walls to see what I was working with, (which may have been how they did the existing run in the first place).

And that, as anyone would imagine, has incredibly low WAF.

geek life fios, home, networking, wiring