Solving a Wiring Mess?

FueledByRamen asks: "While trying to run a new power line for a large Sun mass-storage cabinet (located nowhere near a 220 outlet of course), I had the misfortune of needing to pop the lid on my main power distribution panel (previously opened in the late 80s). The whole thing is a rats nest and probably a fire hazard - old-style wiring with broken-down cloth/plastic insulation strewn everywhere, and the utility's incoming power cables have some sort of junction in them that's the size of a 1-liter bottle (on each wire) and is covered in layers of electrical tape. Even (gently) putting the panel back on jiggled something important, and there was a nasty cracking noise and half the breakers blew (all breakers in one of the 2 columns). I've worked with mains voltage in the past (wiring new rooms, installing lighting), but nothing on this scale, both in terms of complexity and potential for death. How do you industrious Slashdot readers go about fixing a mess like this (on a tight budget, no less) without getting a mains-induced glimpse at the great beyond?"

Good grief

Good god man, leave that mess alone and hire a professional that knows what they are doing. Don't ever put your life in the hands of Slashdot; are you utterly insane?

Re:Good grief

what you really need is a wireless power distribution set up. there's one here:

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/9654/t esla/projecttesla.html [geocities.com]

Re:Good grief

I think what he really means is if anyone from /. is willing to do this for him. In other words, he's saying: "if someone dies, please let it be you and not me."

Re:Good grief

I think you get a qualified electrician to look at this and fix it. If the budget does not permit this, change the budget or consider the business failed. Next go-around, get better due-diligence review of the facilities. We techies can do some power if we are know what we are doing, but this sounds like it is out of our league. One may well have to turn off service power at the pole (or other building entrance) to redo this. Also, you are talking big conductors here, which our techie-tools can't handle. Leaving it alone is bad because there is already evidence of loose connections and grounding problems that will cause your 220 volts to vary over a wide range intermittently, eventually damaging the equipment, and possibly causing electric shock to employees touching poorly-grounded cabinets.

Re:Good grief

It's the friggin' *law* in most jurisdictions to get a licensed electrician to do this work, and for very good reason.

In a facility I ran years ago I smelled smoke in our main distribution panel. Called our electrician and he *immediately* turned white, got out of there dragging me with him, closing the door to the small power distribution room behind him and immediately went to the building's main distribution breakers next to the elevator shaft on the bottom floor and turned off all power to our floor.

Why? He'd seen the insulation bubbling on the aluminum power cable that was connected to the main copper bus for the breaker box.

It had been connected without anti-oxidation gel and the aluminum had oxidized increasing resistance to the point where the insulation was near burning.

He told me that an electrician had been killed earlier in the year when a suburban shopping mall's main panel blew up as he was inspecting it, after having been called in during the wee hours of the night by the fire department after a report of smoke had been called in.

If the original poster's company doesn't own the building then the landlord can be forced to pay, just call in the friggin' city electrical inspector and after he shits his pants your building owner will be paying to rewire the box ASAP.

Re:Good grief

It's a great idea to call in an inspector periodically. Even the best-wired distribution box will eventually go bad and possibly cause a fire.

Why? Stuff expands when it is heated. Your connections are continually undergoing varying stresses depending on the current. When a connection works itself slightly loose, the resistance increases and the process speeds up.

Where I work, we have the local power service come in and take pictures of our distribution boxes with an infrared camera. That's a great way of pinpointing connections that are heating up too much.

This is the reason a computer can stop working, too...sometimes you can just pop the lid, wiggle everything and cinch it down, and it works.

Re:Good grief - In the good old days

What, you're scared of 220 Volts ? When we were growing up, we walked 200 miles through six feet of snow, wearing no shoes, and we repaired 2000 volt circuits with our bare hands. :-)

Re:Good grief - In the good old days

it's not the volts it's the amps that getcha

God, I knew someone was going to say that. Ohm's law... I=V/R. If the voltage goes up, so does the current. They are not mutually exclusive.

Re:Good grief - In the good old days

The key too handling high voltages safely, is to become a good resistor

So resistence...is not futile?

Re:Good grief - In the good old days

What, you're scared of 220 Volts ? When we were growing up, we walked 200 miles through six feet of snow, wearing no shoes, and we repaired 2000 volt circuits with our bare hands. :-)

You call that tough. When I was a kid, we didn't even have hands.

Re:Good grief - In the good old days

Was that before or after you repaired the 2000 volt circuit?

Electrician's Comment on 240V

An American friend of mine was over in Australia, and watched an electrician who was being really conservative with turning all the power off while installing things. Since that didn't seem to be the usual Aussie approach to life, and since electricians in the US usually aren't that careful, he asked him about it. The guy replied that the difference between wimpy US 110 and 240 was "When you touch 240, you bounce about 3 meters farther.".

Basically, don't fsck with the stuff unless you know what you're doing.

Re:Electrician's Comment on 240V

In the US, most houses and small offices have electricity on three wires - a neutral, 110 volts from neutral in one phase, and 110 volts from neutral in the opposite phase (and also a ground), which lets you get 220 by running the appropriate wires to your main power feed. It's mainly used for electric heat, electric clothes driers, and electric water heaters. (There are many other flavors of electric current in the world.)

Most Americans who aren't professional electricians don't have much experience working with the 220, except maybe plugging in their driers. Therefore, people don't treat it with the same respect that they should, as evidenced by FueledByRamen who needs to back away from his box slowly and call a professional electrician.

Bubba says WAKE UP AMIGO!!!

I am a lifelong blue collar guy, gardening, landscaping and construction. I have worked a fair amount part time with electricians. Do it yourself electrical work is ok for outlets, ceiling fans, etc, if you are smart with your hands.

But you need to stay FAR away from the Main Panel unless you are knowledgeable. That thing is dangerous, there ARE many non obvious mistakes you can make if you are not an experienced electrician. You can hurt yourself, burn down the building, damage stuff attached to the electrical system, and if you do something REAL IGNORANT, it is possible (unlikely) you can hurt someone working for the power company outside the house.

This is coming from a Gung Ho!!! Do It Yourselfer/ Shade Tree Mechanic

Why Doctors are not Electricians

I lived in a rented house in college that had what turned out to be dangerous wiring.

LESSON 1: Polarity

Here's a cool tip for you. When wiring up electrical outlets, if you reverse the hot and the neutral lines, you actually create a voltage potential between the outlets. I discovered this because I touched the stove and the refridgerator at the same time accidentally. I got a huge jolt, shook a bit, and called the land lord.

LESSON 2: Breakers and Wiring Guages

If you should ever run wiring in your house, you need to make sure that the breaker that you use matches the capabilities of the wiring. If you should decide to run wiring into an attic using 15 amp capable wiring, it is a bad idea to put a 30 amp breaker on it. It's an even worse idea to hook up approximately 27 amps worth of electrical heaters to this circuit because it will cause the wiring in the wall to catch fire. Of course if one assumes that the person wiring the house isn't insane, you may not know to avoid plugging in said heaters.

LESSON 3: DOCTORS ARE NOT ELECTRICIANS

Eletricity isn't brain surgery, and just as you don't want an electrician siticking sharp metal objects into your brain, you don't want a doctor futzing with wiring. Actually I suppose if you are a doctor who does know how to work with electricity it would be okay, but the one who had previously owned our house had no clue on the subject. Worse, he had no clue and he mistakenly thought that he knew everything.

So, if you look in the electrical box and it instills fear in you, call a professional. Don't even think of doing it yourself.

Re:Good grief

Well shit, now we know how the blackouts occurred.

Re:Good grief

Good god man, leave that mess alone and hire a professional that knows what they are doing. Don't ever put your life in the hands of Slashdot; are you utterly insane?

I'm half expecting the next "Ask Slashdot" to start, "Dear Slashdot, This morning I was diagnosed with acute Apendicitis. I've fooled around a little with self dentistry in the past, but I'm not entirely sure I'm up to a job of this magnitude..."

Legal Issues of Working on Electricity

Close the box lid. Back Away Slowly. Get on your cellphone and call a licensed electrician who also knows something about computer rooms.

If you're talking about not having a 220-volt outlet nearby, you're probably American. But you're calling it "mains power", which is usually a Commonwealth thing. Are you by chance Canadian?

In most of the US, at least if you're in a city or a medium-heavily-populated county, there's probably a building code electrical code that says who's allowed to work on what kind of electricity. Usually in a home, you're allowed to work on sockets and switches inside existing electrical boxes, and almost everywhere you're not allowed to touch the main power feed yourself, and in some jurisdictions you can install new electrical boxes and plug-in circuit breakers yourself and in some you can't. (In New Jersey, you can negotiate with the building inspectors about not noticing things, but Darwin usually wants bigger bribes than they do...) In commercial buildings, you're more likely to need a license.

If you're required to use a licensed electrician for something, and you do it yourself, various Bad Things can happen, and if you do it your self and something goes wrong, more Bad Things _will_ happen. You do not want this... And you said that it looked ugly in there - this significantly increases the chances that if you do work on it yourself, something will go wrong, or perhaps Terribly Wrong, either because it really is an ugly mess or because it's beyond your skill level or both. And if you're renting your building instead of owning it yourself, your lease probably mentions some of the requirements. If you have fire insurance or liability insurance, those contracts probably also require licensed electricians for cases like this.

Whats next - Solving a sanitary mess?

FueledByRamen, you're one crazy son of a bitch, but I salute you - you've got balls (well, at the moment you have, assuming you haven't tried out any of the /. advice yet). And I am really looking forward to your next post "Solving a sanitary mess" when your toilets block up.

Seriously though, there is life outside whatever burnt out dot com shell you are currently living in, with only the roaches keeping you company. You need to get out and get your bare feet on the grass for a while. Smoke something. Lie in the sun with your eyes closed. Try and forget there was ever a place and time when you thought it would be smart to do your own high voltage wiring.

Reminds me of the time ...

I worked at a medium sized amusement park while in college. The park was over 35 years old and much of the wiring and junction boxes were equally as old.

Late one summer night, with the park full of people, all the lights on 'main street' went off.

I was nearby the park's main junction box and helped one of the engineers, an unassuming guy who had worked at the park for years, by holding a flashlight while he started work on the box.

The box was ancient. Cloth wrapped wires. Giant fuses. Old rusty exposed mechanical switches. The works. For whatever reason, one of the main switches had popped open. The engineer first tries popping it back in place. The lights flicker and it just pops back out.

The guy looks at me and says "Point the light at the ground. Help me find some old wire". He searches around with his hands for a minute and finds a snipping of some very heavy guage plastic insulated wire.

To my shock, the guy closes the switch shut with one hand while using the other to hold the insulated part of the wire and *arc-welds the switch shut* with the wire's exposed conductor! Sparks flew, the lights snapped back on, and I damn near shit my pants. This good old boy engineer didn't even blink. "That should hold it until we can get someone out tomorrow".

The only thing I can figure is that he was somehow electrically insulated, perhaps from his huge set of balls for even considering something like this.

Auditioning for the Darwin award???

Maybe it's just me, but some things are worth paying for [ibew.org]. I prefer juice in my stomach, not coursing through my entire body...

Re:Nope

"First thing to do is SHUT OFF THE POWER AND INSURE IT WILL NOT BE TURNED BACK ON UNTIL YOU ARE DONE!!!"

This is extremely good advice.* Professional electricians will put a little warning sign over any breakers, switches, etc. that are shut off that says essentially, "if you turn on power here, you'll kill someone." Make sure you have one.

That said, I too think this is a very good way to add yourself to the next Darwin Awards.

*Ignoring the goofup with "insure" used rather than "ensure", but that's not a *big* deal.

Hang a LOCK.

Maybe they do where you live, but here, you hang a lock. The sign you describe is attached to the lock and has your picture on it, contact information, and contact information for your supervisor and employer.

Don't have one of those? THAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT FARKIN' QUALIFIED TO DO THE WORK!

If you have not had the correct training, you CAN NOT safely lock out equipment. Sure. You locked it out. You stuck your wiggy in the wall socket to make sure you got a buzz. You tested each terminal and they were all dead. You started stripping wires. You reached way into the cabinet to unscrew some terminals in the back. It got dark and the building's outside lighting circuit turned on. Guess what? Someone ran the lighting circuit through the box.

oopsie.

You don't know what you're doing. Neither does the person who "told you how" to do this safely. Hire a professional.

Safety practices around high power.

I used to write software at a high-energy physics lab. The technicians would put padlocks that only they had keys for on switches when they powered something down. Removing someone else's lock was grounds for immediate dismissal. If someone accidentally left a lock on something, they had to personally remove it or (you guessed it) face dismissal. They took these rules very seriously.

Re:Safety practices around high power.

In fact, at the Esso terminal my dad worked at, the lockout "scissors" were set up with eight sets of holes in them. You threw the breaker to off, opened the scissors, then closed them so the "teeth" went through the hole to lock it out.

Then, you put your lock on, through one hole. Your buddy put HIS lock on through another hole. Anyone else that came along later? They put their lock on too, through another hole.

That way, the first guy doesn't mistakenly power the system back on, zotting some other guy that came along after him and went "Oh, OK, it's already locked out."

Encrypted data exchange

Interesting, this is essentially how public key encryption works.

The problem they're trying to solve is that a message gets sent through a public channel (such as the postal service) without either party giving up their private key and without the data ever being unencrypted until it's safely in the hands of the recipient. The best explanation of it I've heard goes like this.

"Alice writes a message and locks it in a chest with her padlock. This chest has holes (hasps) for two separate padlocks. [Note: no reason it can't have n hasps, as in the wiring example.] She sends the locked box to Bob through the mail.

Bob places his own padlock through the remaining hasp, and mails it back to Alice.

Alice removes her own padlock and mails the box, with just Bob's padlock on it, back to Bob.

Bob removes his own padlock and reads the message."

Of course, this is all being done over TCP instead of the post, and with math instead of padlocks, but you get the idea.

None of this has anything to do with a wiring mess, but the similarities are striking.

Re:Auditioning for the Darwin award???

SHUT OFF THE POWER AND INSURE IT WILL NOT BE TURNED BACK ON UNTIL YOU ARE DONE!!!

Having worked as a theatrical light technician, tagging out a circuit is second nature to me now, but incompetence is a force to be reckoned with. About a year ago, I was changing an intelligence module in a hard-wired Rosco dimmer (basically involves removing 4 mains wires, and a few ribbon cables). I had tagged the circuit out and got on the scissor lift to change the module. When I removed the access panel the power LED was lit...turns out someone had removed my tag and turned the breaker on again...moron! I stationed a fellow tech by the panel while I finished the job.

Another piece of sound advice when working in HV situations (or, rather, any situation not involving low-voltage wiring) is to only make contact with one hand leaving the other behind one's back--that'll reduce the chance of getting a current across your chest which'll send you to lighting tech heaven.

Re:Auditioning for the Darwin award???

I did some theater work, in the totally amateur area, and on one production that I produced, I had to wire the lighting panel into the mains, because the theater was built in 1924 and still had most of its original lighting equipment. We figured that 75-year old rheostat dimmers the size of car tires that made a sound like a chainsaw when you pulled the foot-long lever weren't going to work well for our production.

So we borrowed/rented the equipment we needed, and the lights, wired everything up, and got ready to hook the main control box up. I got the pigtails ready and opened up the panel where the theater tech told me the power should be.

Inside, three very large, uninsulated, copper bars going from top to bottom.

All the others with me just looked at it and said "all yours, man". Great. So I double-checked the power was turned off to this panel- it had a very large switch, and you could *see* the switches disengage, but I still didn't trust that, then triple-checked it with a meter.

I was still nervous as all hell just putting my hand near these things, even knowing they were off. One handed, keeping the other hand behind me (I remembered that advice from my HS electronics teacher) I undid the big allen bolts and hooked the pigtail up.

It actually worked first try. Undoing it at the end of the production was almost as harrowing as the first time. I had the old mantra of labratory physics running through my head- "Hot glass looks exactly like cold glass", only I had modified it to "live copper looks exactly like dead copper". I also knew that if it was live, I probably wouldn't even know it before I was killed or rendered unconscious.

Yeesh. I still can't believe I was stupid or bold enough to do that.

In keeping with the other folks here, I'd say to the original asker, hire a bloody electrician, and don't get near the thing until someone tells you it's safe. Budget be damned, you don't want to risk your life on something like that.

Hooking up a simple pigtail is one thing, futzing around in the panel you described is suicide.

On a side note, I once got nailed by a 220 V dryer when I was about 8 years old. I was reaching for a sock that had fallen behind it, and touched one of the leads that was left exposed (!). It threw me about 15 feet across the laundry room and put a crack in the door where I hit it.

Re:Auditioning for the Darwin award???

Couple of notes from an amateur electrician:

"I would suggest buying several different colors to help keep things straight in the next step."

Um, there are color codes for a reason:
black (for sure), red (if 220), orange (if 3-phase, then it's the high leg) are all hot
white - neutral
no insulation or green - ground

"SHUT OFF THE POWER AND INSURE IT WILL NOT BE TURNED BACK ON UNTIL YOU ARE DONE!!!"

And if possible, pull the meter. Seriously. Have the power company pull the meter, do your work with the meter pulled, then have the power company put the meter back in. However, the power company will probably want to see a permit, and that will take a licensed electrician in most cases, so that may not be an option.

Also...if you are terminating aluminum connections, make sure to use anti-oxidant goop on the terminations and torque them only to the recommended specs. Don't have a torque wrench? Call an electrician. Al is nasty if not terminated correctly. In fact, that goes for all connections. If at possible, beg or borrow a torque wrench so that you can terminate connections to the proper specifications. Note that that only applies to main connections, not branch circuits.

Outsource

...How do you industrious Slashdot readers go about fixing a mess like this (on a tight budget, no less)...

Hire someone from China or India to do it! :)

Obvious answer?

Hire an electrician.

buy the cheapest parachute you can!

pay someone who does it for a living, not a hobby. if they die, you dont have to worry. Its not something to do to save money... something are worth paying for.

Re:buy the cheapest parachute you can!

Heh, reminds me of a story. I used to work at Home Depot, and one of the regular electrical customers said that, in whack-job wirings like you have, he would be able to tell the difference between 110v and 220v by grabbing it the wire. If it hurt more, it was 220. If it hurt less, it was 110. He quit coming in one year, and I always wondered what happened to him...

Re:buy the cheapest parachute you can!

Ha!

A friend of mine and I were leaning over a running engine on opposite sides of the car.
He touched an ignition cable and the current went :
- Up his arm
- Down his legs to earth
- Up *my* legs to crotch
- from my crotch to frame of car that I was leaning against to look in engine bay.

Ow. Sure didn't see that one coming!

Re:buy the cheapest parachute you can!

- Up his arm
- Down his legs to earth
- Up *my* legs to crotch

Nothing but net!

Re:buy the cheapest parachute you can!

I've felt both a time or two (accidentally). 110 is really more of a tickle and certainly won't kill you.

You've got to be respectful of it but with 110 I didn't even realize I was being shocked until well after the fact.


Dude, 110 volts is most certainly enough to kill. True, most of us have been "tingled" by 110/115 a few times, and didn't die... all that proves is that we were lucky on those occassions.

For an interesting discussion of why low voltages *can* be deadly, see this page [dansdata.com].

The bottom line is, lower voltages tend to be "safer" due to the resistance of your body, and the fact that low voltage power sources also usually have a fairly low current capacity. But try wetting your hands and grabbing the leads from an arc welder set on 200+ amps sometime, if you don't think low voltage can f#@k you up.

Re:buy the cheapest parachute you can!

At Brookhaven National Lab, the high-voltage systems are considered relatively safe. It's the 5V electronics-power distribution systems that carry upwards of 600A and have fuses bigger around than your fist. Shorting one of those with a wrench would make the wrench explode.

110V can tickle. 5V can kill.

Good, cheap, fast: pick any two

ow do you industrious Slashdot readers go about fixing a mess like this (on a tight budget, no less) without getting a mains-induced glimpse at the great beyond?"

There is a reason why good industrial electricans charge a lot for their services: they work with dangerous stuff, and they know what they are doing. Get an estimate from a good one. If the powers-that-be refuse to approve the project, resign. That day.

sPh

Re:Good, cheap, fast: pick any two-Insurance.

There's also insurance reasons as well. Having someone other than a qualified electrician do the work can void your fire insurance.