On 12 April, in one of my more random witterings, I talked about this lamp:
Mick wanted to remove it, but the end decision was that it had to stay because it was easier than trying to find out (in the absence of ever having found a switch) where the wires ran so as to disconnect it.
That position was changed by fate this week; or rather, by an electrical fault that tripped the breaker for the upstairs lighting circuit. I could, perhaps, have forgiven a single trip, but the fact that it tripped repeatedly told me it was an unignorable fault.
I didn’t much fancy the tedious process of trying to find the fault, but neither could we live without upstairs lights (although easier at this time of year than in winter!). After ruling out the most obvious (and also easiest) cause, further investigations* revealed a few things:
1) Our ‘upstairs lighting’ breaker on the consumer unit also covers the utility room and the outside lights;
2) Our bedside lights are not directly connected to the upstairs lighting circuit, but are wired via the utility room spur (particularly bizarre given those lights and the utility room lie at diagonally opposite corners of the house);
3) The wires for all of the later additions to this breaker are connected via two stuffed-full junction boxes in a confined area of loft space;
4) The switch for the outside lights was a light (not movement) sensor mounted on the roof;
5) I’m now pretty sure that a small electrical box behind a radiator is where the armoured cable from the garden lamp meets the wiring from the house, however, we cannot access that box without removing the radiator.
I was rather proud that, having taken a guess as to what each wire was for, based on where it appeared to be headed, my further investigations proved me right in all cases. All of those wires are now numbered and my back-of-a-scrap-envelope sketch has now been written more neatly and lives up in the loft by those junction boxes so as to make any future maintenance easier.
As for the fault, it was the light sensor up on the roof. It is now disconnected and thus it would now be a straightforward job to either remove the offending lamppost or to install a switch so that we can use both of the outside lights, however, given that we’ve managed for eight years without those lights I think we can easily convince ourselves that they’re not needed.
Yep, more cakes. Coconut sponge this time. Far yummier than they look.
(*In my experience it’s best not to trace the wiring in your house as doing so tends to lead to the uncovering of things you’d rather not know about. There was an incident a few houses ago when, in removing plaster** to install a damp-proof course, I cut straight through the wire to the socket into which my SDS drill was plugged (yep, I’d marked the relevant channel in red and hatched it through to denote that I wasn’t to go near that area… then managed to overlook the markings). In putting it right I started by tracing all wires and creating a wiring diagram for the entire house and in so doing uncovered some absolute horrors of bad practice. Then there was a house we bought thinking it needed nothing doing to it and on the first day we were there I discovered that five sockets and three lights in an outbuilding had all been spurred from a single socket in the kitchen. I could go on…
**Mick knew nothing about this activity until he got home from work and found we had no plaster on the bottom 1m of the downstairs walls. He hadn't even known I'd been at home that day. The reason I was at home was a little ironic: two weeks previously a contractor had accidentally cut through the electric supply cable for the entire manufacturing site at which I was working; whilst discussions went on as to who was liable to put it right, the supply was re-routed; on the morning in question a different contractor accidentally cut through the rerouted supply; there wasn’t another supply cable so no further re-routing was possible thus the site got closed whilst an impressive number of industrial generators was brought in to provide temporary power pending restoration of the mains supply.)
Mick wanted to remove it, but the end decision was that it had to stay because it was easier than trying to find out (in the absence of ever having found a switch) where the wires ran so as to disconnect it.
That position was changed by fate this week; or rather, by an electrical fault that tripped the breaker for the upstairs lighting circuit. I could, perhaps, have forgiven a single trip, but the fact that it tripped repeatedly told me it was an unignorable fault.
I didn’t much fancy the tedious process of trying to find the fault, but neither could we live without upstairs lights (although easier at this time of year than in winter!). After ruling out the most obvious (and also easiest) cause, further investigations* revealed a few things:
1) Our ‘upstairs lighting’ breaker on the consumer unit also covers the utility room and the outside lights;
2) Our bedside lights are not directly connected to the upstairs lighting circuit, but are wired via the utility room spur (particularly bizarre given those lights and the utility room lie at diagonally opposite corners of the house);
3) The wires for all of the later additions to this breaker are connected via two stuffed-full junction boxes in a confined area of loft space;
4) The switch for the outside lights was a light (not movement) sensor mounted on the roof;
5) I’m now pretty sure that a small electrical box behind a radiator is where the armoured cable from the garden lamp meets the wiring from the house, however, we cannot access that box without removing the radiator.
I was rather proud that, having taken a guess as to what each wire was for, based on where it appeared to be headed, my further investigations proved me right in all cases. All of those wires are now numbered and my back-of-a-scrap-envelope sketch has now been written more neatly and lives up in the loft by those junction boxes so as to make any future maintenance easier.
As for the fault, it was the light sensor up on the roof. It is now disconnected and thus it would now be a straightforward job to either remove the offending lamppost or to install a switch so that we can use both of the outside lights, however, given that we’ve managed for eight years without those lights I think we can easily convince ourselves that they’re not needed.
(*In my experience it’s best not to trace the wiring in your house as doing so tends to lead to the uncovering of things you’d rather not know about. There was an incident a few houses ago when, in removing plaster** to install a damp-proof course, I cut straight through the wire to the socket into which my SDS drill was plugged (yep, I’d marked the relevant channel in red and hatched it through to denote that I wasn’t to go near that area… then managed to overlook the markings). In putting it right I started by tracing all wires and creating a wiring diagram for the entire house and in so doing uncovered some absolute horrors of bad practice. Then there was a house we bought thinking it needed nothing doing to it and on the first day we were there I discovered that five sockets and three lights in an outbuilding had all been spurred from a single socket in the kitchen. I could go on…
**Mick knew nothing about this activity until he got home from work and found we had no plaster on the bottom 1m of the downstairs walls. He hadn't even known I'd been at home that day. The reason I was at home was a little ironic: two weeks previously a contractor had accidentally cut through the electric supply cable for the entire manufacturing site at which I was working; whilst discussions went on as to who was liable to put it right, the supply was re-routed; on the morning in question a different contractor accidentally cut through the rerouted supply; there wasn’t another supply cable so no further re-routing was possible thus the site got closed whilst an impressive number of industrial generators was brought in to provide temporary power pending restoration of the mains supply.)
You must try Lemon Curd Muffins next (River Cottage recipe!)
ReplyDeleteI took a look at the recipe so as to follow your advice, but it involves both yoghurt and milk which are two ingredients we seldom have in the house. You have, however, put the idea into my head of making some lemon curd and incorporating it into a different muffin recipe. I shall report back in due course (sometime after my next shopping trip as I'm not sure we've got enough lemons to spare at the moment)...
DeleteSince you've already got the wiring there you could get rid of the lamp and have a pond with pump and waterfall instead?
ReplyDeleteI can't deny that would be an option ... but it wouldn't be top of my list.
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