A little blog for a restless mind

In the Wrong Business

After I've seen a few oddities around the house, I started to get suspicious. You know, it's not quite common to have an electricity cable coming directly from the wall, in the kitchen behind the stove, to connect to the cooker. You see, my mom bought a new stove since the old one was in ruins, so it's only right for me to get the old one out and the new one in. With the help of my sister I got the old one out and trusted my sister with the cleaning of the place before we installed the new stove.
"Aiiee, there're sparks coming from the cable," suddenly screams my sister. A bit dreamy from a lousy train voyage, first with some grumpy old people, and then some Russians with a very very bad breath, and still with a heavy head from the headache of headaches of the day before, I look at the thing and say: "Yea right. You're seeing ghosts. Just roughly clean it up so we can finish this." Oh, did I tell you in what a bad mood I was? I'm still not quite healthy. Some damn virosis, for which my doctor didn't prescribe me anything. Just some odd thing for the outer ear infection of my left ear. Interestingly, the original drug usage directions don't even mention ears. It says it's for eyes. Go figure. But I digress.
So my sister resumes cleaning and suddenly asks me, "Isn't there something wrong if a part of the cable is gleaming?" Suddenly a chill ran down my spine. "Er, what?!" "Yeah, look here, just as the cable comes out of the wall it's perforated and a thin wire inside is gleaming." It's good I have fast reflexes. Very fast. I don't even require any thinking. Right after I've seen the smelly gleaming thing I was already at the switchboard unscrewing fuses and asking my sister if it stopped gleaming.
Oh dear God. Or Goddess. Whatever. Oh dear divine being. The fuse for this circuit was very hot. And very strong. 16 amps. I've checked if anything else is connected to this circuit, but no, 16 amp fuse only for one cooker. That's for... 16*220... hmmm... 3500 W stuff? There's no way a simple 2-plate electric cooker needs such a strong fuse. I've replaced it with a 10 amp fuse. But before that I've replaced the damn cable. And what a long operation that was.
The original cable had 5 leads which means it was meant for the three-phase current. The cooker needs the regular one-phase current since it has a regular plug for the regular wall socket. Curiously enough, the cable had this regular one-phase socket at the end. "Err, what?" I went. "Ooookay..." and so I opened the access point in the wall a few centimeters away, where the cable was connected to the electric circuit. 5 leads all right. But... I unscrewed only one fuse. What about other two phases? So I checked all the leads for current, but they were all dead. Whatever. I'll just buy a new cable. But it was Saturday afternoon and all the shops with special stuff I wanted were closed. So I bought an ordinary cable packaged in 2 meter lengths, a 4.5V battery and an adequate lightbulb, and a socket to mount on the cable. Curiously enough, the cable had only a plug at one end, the other end having nothing but three stripped wires. They didn't have the variant of the cable with only one socket. That would have been ideal. But I can never get anything ideal. Everything has to be twisted in some way. But I digress, again. I used the battery and the lightbulb to check which wire of the socket was which wire in the access point. It wasn't easy. All three wires were shorted. But then I twisted the cable in one direction and suddenly they weren't shorted anymore and I could easily see which was ground, phase, and null. And then mom came home from shopping for flowers and candles. "Ah, yes, this thing was sizzling for a long time. Every time I cleaned up around there it sparked a bit, but then I just nudged it a few times until it stopped." I was shocked. No comment. Just a question: "Do any other cables sizzle when you clean arond them?" "No." Good. Then I preached something about burning up the house, why didn't she tell anyone for years, and so on. But what do mothers know about electricity, high current, heating of wires, melting of isolators around conductors, amperage of fuses, three-phase current, grounding, and so on, right?
Right. So I pulled the cable from the wall. And a tile fell off from the wall that was at the hole, partially covering it. Now I'll have to be a mason, too. I spent ages mounting the socket on the new cable. Damn socket, they produced it so it was all embedded in a flexible plastic, almost like a gum, round and round, and I just didn't know how to get the insides out, so I cut the damn gum or whatever in half, mounted the damn thing, and then taped it back together. Idiots. And I threw the plug away that was on the new cable. Then I spent ages screwing the appropriate wires together in the access hole. I used thermoplastic connectors for that. It's neat, just plug in one end of one wire, screw it tight, at the other end plug in one end of the other wire, and screw that too. Screw everything. Screw USA. But I digress, for the third time. The access hole is quite small for my artistic expression of an electrician, so I had some trouble fitting everything into the hole. But I managed. And then, time for a chisel and a hammer. To get the old glue from the wall. And then glue on the tile that fell off. Yes, for some reason I have all the material and utensils at home. I suppose it's easy to tell I do stuff like this quite often. And a lot of other stuff. Like fixing plumbing, pipes, roof tiles, etc.
All this was a bit too much for my sanity to handle so I asked my mom exactly how old is this house. "Oh, the construction began somewhere in 1950 and went on for several years." Hmmmm... Several years? Hold on there. Who exactly built it then? "Well, your grandfather, of course." What? One person built the whole house? "Of course not, a few friends helped him." Ahhh... That's why everything looks a bit spooky. "And it isn't even finished yet, the attic was supposed to have rooms to live in." Oooookaaayy... I think it's a wrong idea if you continue telling me about the history of this house.
I think I'd be a great housekeeper.
It wasn't until today that I istalled the new stove. Heaps of new problems. Oh, and my mom bought a new freezer, too. The old one is exhausted. It just runs endlessly and has a hard time keeping everything frozen. So I had to install this today, too. And a few more problems. Tiny. But I'm too tired to explain everything. I need rest, not work.

posted by AlesS @ 10/31/2004 05:59:00 PM