8) The Residential Electrical Finish Stage continued.

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The "Finish" Stage
  Acquire Material
  Distribute material
  Install devices
  Install can light trims
  Install fixtures
  Install appliances
>Install miscellaneous
  Inspection
  Troubleshooting

  Finish Step 7   Install Miscellaneous  

  Install a Door Chime.  
          
Door chimes have 3 parts in 3 locations; The chime, the transformer and the button. The chime is normally hung on the wall in a hallway. The button is mounted outside the main entry normally on the wall or door trim near the door knob. The transformer is often located at the furnace attached to the disconnecting switch. Some will mount transformers in the attic above the entry or the chime. The best location is in a 2 gang nail on box hidden behind the chime in the hallway.

Mount the button
Mount the button first. If you mount the button last you will be ringing the chime so much that people will start throwing stuff at you. There are 3 types of buttons you should know about; a surface type the easiest to mount, a recessed style that has a removable round button that has to be recessed into the wall even if the wall is brick, and a button with a diode for chimes that play music. When you let go of a door bell button you cut off the power. The diode keeps the power flowing until the song has ended. All 3 of these styles have 2 terminal screws for small 18 gauge wires. Find your wires sticking out of the wall outside the entry. Strip the ends of the wires and attach them to the terminal screws, one wire per terminal. If your chime plays music, find the diode in a bag in the package. Attach one end of the diode to one terminal (plus one wire), and the other end of the diode to the other terminal (with the other wire)

Push your wires back into the wall and use the 2 small screws to mount the button to the wall. If the wire won't push into the wall you might have to cut your wires shorter so they will tuck up into the back of the button. If the wall is brick, mark the location of the holes and drill them out with a 1/4 inch masonry bit from an anchor kit. Cut the plastic anchors in half and insert them into the hole for your screws to mount. If the plastic anchors don't work with the small screws, try whittling a piece of wood into a thin pencil and hammer it into the holes. The wood will give the screws something to grab on to. With the recessed style button you will have to cut out a center hole in the wall large enough for the button to sit into yet not so big that the button will not cover it. The hard part is to enlarge the hole without damaging the wires, especially in brick. Mounting the button on the door trim with a pre-drilled center hole can save allot of headaches.

Mount and wire the Transformer.
Find it first. At the furnace or in the attic or the best place; in a 2 gang in the hallway high on the wall. The standard chime transformer has to sides to it. One side has wires for 120 volt connections and the other side has 2 terminal screws for 12 volt connections. The 120 volt wire side is often set into a 1/2 inch hole on a metal box and secured with a lock nut. Connect the wires; black to black, white to white and green to bare ground. Then find the small 18 gauge wires and connect one to one terminal screw and the other to the 2nd terminal screw.

Wire and mount the Chime.
To help understand how a chime is wired remember this; Power leaves the transformer on one wire where it travels through the button, then through the chime and then back to the transformer. In order for the power to get from the transformer to the button, 2 wires (one from the transformer and one from the button) have to be connected together at the chime without connecting to the chime. The remaining 2 wires connect to the chime, one on the terminal labeled "Transformer" and the other labeled "Front door" When the wires are connected, mount the chime to the wall.


  Finish Step 8 Inspection  
Inspect your work for errors, missing or unfinished work and call to arrange for a government inspection.

Test everything; Every receptacle, every light, every 3 way switch. The last receptacle on the line can be dead because the wires are not connected together in the second to the last receptacle box. And those wires are not connected together because the whole box is covered over with sheet rock.

Use a plug in tester to check receptacles and GFIs be sure to turn lighting switches off when testing receptacles. A miswired switch will turn room receptacles off, by leaving the switch off you will discover this mistake when you find a dead receptacle.

This "plug in" style tester checks polarity, missing grounds and can test trip a GFI circuit One of two, 3way switches can work properly even if the other 3way is miswired and will not work at all. To properly test two 3ways, flip the first 3way so the light comes on and off and leave it off. Now go to 2nd 3way and turn the light back on, finally go back to the first 3way and see if you can turn it off. If you cannot turn it back on then one of the traveler wires is on the common screw. (And the common wire is on the traveler screw)

Search for receptacles hidden in cabinets or closets. Check outside, in attics and crawl spaces for unfinished work.

As mentioned in the Rough in inspection; Beginners have trouble recognizing that they did not finish their assignment. Finished means 100% complete not 90% Beginners will say "I'm finished" yet when you check their work 5 to 10% of the task is incomplete because they overlooked it. Double check your own work.

After you and your company have inspected your own work arrangements will be made for a government inspection. Depending on where you live in the US this inspector will either work for the state, the county or the city where your project is located. Most inspections require a fee and some charge extra to reinspect when your work fails. And yes there are areas in the country where no government inspection is required at all. In this case the owners might hire a private house inspector.



Finish Step 9 Troubleshooting.

                           

Pen testers make troubleshooting easier.
This pen tester by Fluke, lights up when
the tip is held near something electrically
hot like a wire or a terminal screw.
Fluke calls this tester a 1AC-I VoltAlertTM
Photo courtesy http://us.fluke.com


The Key to Troubleshooting;
 - Reduce the problem to its smallest non-working size and then repair, replace or bypass it. 
 - Reduce the problem by separating the working parts from the non-working part.
 - When troubleshooting, ignore the advise given to you by those who cannot fix the problem.

For example, a bedroom circuit trips the breaker. Find a receptacle in the center of the circuit and disconnect all the wires to that one outlet. Now turn the breaker back on, if it holds then all the wires, receptacles, switches and lights are good up to that center receptacle and the problem lies beyond our center receptacle. We have just  separated working parts of the circuit with non-working parts and reduced the problem to half its size. We now are left with 5 dead outlets. Turn the breaker off, reconnect the wires in the first center outlet and disconnect the wires in the outlet in the center of those last 5 dead outlets. Turn the breaker back on, if it holds then the problem is in the last 3 outlets and the wires connecting them, if the breaker trips then the problem is between this outlet we just disconnected and the first outlet we disconnected. You continue this process until you find an outlet with the ground wire touching the hot terminal screw. Or a section of wiring that has a nail through it from the siding installer.

 Now you "repair, replace or bypass it".

Repair the outlet by pulling the ground wire off the hot screw and installing the outlet back into the box being careful not to allow the ground to bend up against the other terminals.

Replace the bad wiring by removing the 2 boxes, reach in and up the wall and pull out the staples, tie a new wire on to the end of the bad wire, pull the bad wire out as it feeds in the attached new wire, disconnect the bad wire, reinstall the boxes and outlets.

or Bypass the bad wiring by disconnecting both ends of the bad piece of wire from the receptacles, cap them off and tuck them into the back of the box. Go up into the attic and drill a hole in the top of the wall above the 2 outlets, run a new wire across the attic and fish the ends down to the boxes below, (or drill up from an unfinished basement or crawl space below) re-install the outlets to the new wire.

It is best to finish installing everything before troubleshooting!
The reason for this is that power (electricity) will not flow through wires that are not connected and many wires will not be connected until they are attached to a receptacle, or connected together at a smoke detector. You might waste allot of time trying to figure out why 3 outlets on the living room wall don't work only to discover that the wires feeding those 3 pass through an uninstalled floor outlet where the wires are not yet connected together.

Examples of lost power;
➪ A receptacle box is hidden and the wires are not connected together preventing power from reaching the dead portion of the circuit. Hidden because the cabinet installer forgot to cut out the receptacle box in the back of the cabinet or bookshelf. Or hidden because the sheet rocker didn't cut it out of the sheet rock. Find the box, cut it out and connect the wires.

➪ A switch is mis-wired preventing power from reaching the dead portion of the circuit until the switch is turned on. A switch that is supposed to turn off a light can easily be mis-wired in way that it turns off an entire room. Disconnect all the black wires, find the one that is hot, use it to find the switch leg to the light, put the switch leg on the one of the switch terminal screws, connect the hot with the remaining black feed wires and pigtail them to the other terminal screw on the switch.

➪ A GFI receptacle is tripped. A GFI in one bathroom can turn off a vanity receptacle in another bathroom. Find all the GFI receptacles and press the reset button.

➪ Half of a room is dead because a wire was not pulled between receptacle boxes. To fix this problem, a new wire has to be added from one of the dead receptacles to the closest working receptacle. A new wire is added by fishing a wire up from the crawl space/ basement (or down from the attic). The boxes are removed from the wall by cutting the nails. The space below (or above) the box is located and a hole is drilled up into the bottom plate ((or down into the top plate) The new wire is pushed up into the hole and pulled out where the box was,the wire is run across the crawl (attic) space and sent up to the other box and then everything is put back together. If these methods are not possible you can cut a narrow strip of the sheet rock from box to box just wide enough to drill the studs, then run the wire through the holes, insert the wire into the boxes and replace the strip of sheet rock.


A Troubleshooting Story.

Early in my career, I was assigned to restore power on a dead circuit at an older house. The owner of the house showed me the problem circuit down in his basement. I asked him to show me the panel location, which was also down in the basement. As we walked over to the panel he told me several times that the problem was "not the fuse!" He explained that he had checked the fuse and it was in good condition. He gave me a look that said 'you better not touch that fuse boy'

So, I proceeded to Reduce the problem to its smallest non-working size and as I did everything started pointing to the panel. Eventually I had the whole circuit working up to the fuse (by feeding power from another circuit to the back end of the problem circuit)

Finally, with nothing left to check, I inspected the fuse. In a way, he was right, the 20 amp fuse was in good condition. What he didn't understand was that the fuse was not making contact because it was the wrong amperage. This special 20 amp fuse was specifically designed so that it would not make contact in a 15 amp circuit terminal socket. You can screw it in, but it will not touch the hot buss bar inside the panel. This safety design prevents 20 amps of electricity from overloading 15 amp wiring and causing a fire. After restoring everything on the circuit I installed a 15 amp fuse and the circuit worked. The power could have been restored more quickly if I had heard this advise;

"When troubleshooting, ignore the advise given to you by those who cannot fix the problem!" 
James Morelli © 2005 updated 2014


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