BY DAVID McWETHY
We had not lived in the house I’d built for us more than a few weeks when I was awakened at 2:30 by a sharp elbow-jab from my wife, immediately followed by a decisively-whispered “Get up! There’s a noise of something coming from the bathroom!”
Quite possibly the last thing I would have voluntarily done right then was trade the cozy warmth of the bed for the knowledge of what made a hissing sound that was much like a rather significant leak in an air hose. But even in my somnambulistic state it only took my steel-trap mind a minute or so to recall that there weren’t any compressed-air lines in the upstairs Master Bath; and that to get to the source of the sound, whatever creature was causing the noise would have had to walk (slither? NO! Don’t go there….) past us, while we were soundly sleeping in our bed.
Since the cause of the noise evidently meant us no harm (or it had poor night vision) I was content to leave well enough alone—with me (and, of course, my darling wife) amply protected by the magical powers of ducking under the covers if the situation worsened. At least ‘til dawn’s early light (and after we had been left with ne’er a hair disturbed). What was the worst thing that could happen if we paused to reflect before acting? Oh, that’s right: Whatever it was, it could leave the toilet seat up.
Meanwhile, painful experience had taught me that, at dark-thirty, the silence from my wife did not mean that she had gone back to sleep: It meant that she was coldly and methodically calculating the angle of declination, range, and trajectory for the next elbow jab—which would not be a shot in the dark, but a bomb-right-down-the-chimney, like the famous some-say-staged video. Except the target for the second—lethal—jab wouldn’t be a chimney. It would be my nearest vulnerable soft spot.
So not taking time to find my house slippers in the dark, I ever-so-quietly tip-toed toward the quite distinct sound of compressed air. Until my bare feet on the carpet became bare-feet-on-WET-carpet.
Crouched in preparation for flight, when I snapped on the lights (giving no thought to the wisdom of hand on light switch/feet standing on wet carpet), the mystery of the hissing (that involved neither compressed air nor anything slithering) was solved:
During the early stages of the plan-as-you-go construction of the house I had come across an antique claw-and-ball-foot, high sided, enamel or whatever on cast iron bathtub in perfect condition for only $75 and obstacles be damned, that 400-pound bathtub was GOING to be in the (upstairs) Master Bath.
And so it eventually was, due to the efforts of six men and two cases of beer (each; plus curses I hadn’t heard since high school) getting it up the spiral staircase. I would have provided physical assistance, but had encountered “a hitch in my get-along” the day before, so could only provide moral support.
But it just fit and it was the perfect center of attention for that room. Even its sides were the exactly-right height for my wife to place her posterior on while “doing” her nails or plucking toe-hair after the bath. (We’re divorced now, so I can say anything I want).
And therein lay the problem: Each time she sat on the side of this cast-iron tub, with its four golden feet resting on thick carpet, her weight would cause one side of the tub to be pushed into the carpet slightly more than was the other side. And because the whole house-building project had been a learning experience (such as “Don’t connect rigid bronze water lines to an incrementally-moving-back-and-forth bath tub) I learned what happens when you did: Eventually one of them (5/8”, fed with 60 p.s.i. water, no skimping on OUR house, no sir!) suffered enough metal fatigue to split and in an amazingly short time three out of four sheetrock walls and carpet clear out into the hallway were drenched!
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I did have enough sense to use exterior plywood subfloor for the bathroom instead of “particular board”, but reading Fine Homebuilding could only do so much, and I’d screwed up royally on the type of water lines that supplied the tub. (And, tangentially, I learned a thing or two about the wisdom of buying my buddy several lunches instead of letting him be a flint-hearted, squinty-eyed plumbing inspector).
As luck (?) would have it, the main electrical panel from whence all power flowed was located on the first floor directly under—can you guess? Good job!
The first thing I did (while it was too dark for the neighbors to see me if any HAD been awake at that hour) was put on my bathrobe and slippers and—armed only with an adjustable wrench—shut off the water main to the house; and then open every downhill faucet I could think of. Nevertheless, it took a surprisingly long time to drain 60’ of yard line, during which much of it cascaded down the wall onto, into, around and through the main electrical panel. After calling a few professionals (whose judgment at 3:00 a.m. I trusted more than I did my own) the lady of the house and I, armed with a flashlight and some used-to-be-decorative candles, retired for the rest of the short night.
By next morning, the draining of the water line was finished, and while waiting for an electrical contractor (“…and a real byGod plumber!” the lady (?) of the house fumed) I had the remarkably good sense to (standing in rubber boots on dry lumber arranged as a walkway) use the 80 gallons of compressed air which had been stored in the tank, just waiting for orders, and blew the water out of the electrical main.
When the electrical contractor finally arrived the breaker box was darned near DRY, and all the breakers had reset and held except one: A 20-amp line that went directly from the panel, through the studs of one wall of a mini-darkroom, and thence into the kitchen, where it served outlets until it got close enough to the sink for the task to be taken over by the GFCI circuit coming from the other direction.
It would not be exactly correct to say that this last breaker didn’t reset. True, if you attempted to reset it, the breaker would immediately trip. But if you quickly reset it again, it held. Until sometime later—usually ten to fifteen minutes—when, for no apparent reason, it would trip. And this developed into the semblance of a pattern: If you reset it, it would immediately—as if it were a “dead short”—trip. If you then reset it, it would hold. HOWEVER: If you allowed a period of time to elapse between the tripping and the attempted resetting it would again immediately trip.
Naturally, the electrical contractor replaced every breaker, first thing, and after the power company pulled the meter long enough for him to safely poke and prod the cover was snapped back into place, the security wire was crimped, and it was the general conclusion that—considering the stupidity of the mistake (they phrased it in a much less confrontational way)—there really was very little damage.
Except for that one blankety-blank circuit…
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The repair costs had easily exceeded the insurance deductible, so with a sigh of resignation the adjuster threw up his hands and got out the checkbook; the electrician started thinking about that bass boat again, and attention shifted to the last outlet on the circuit. Every appliance or user of electric power had been unplugged or disconnected—to rule out the admittedly slight possibility that there were actually two separate and unrelated events had taken place within time-proximity of one another.
But when nuthin’ was plugged into nuthin’ the isolation of the circuit from any extraneous causality had no effect on the by-now familiar-to-everyone sequence: Reset; trip; reset; hold. Trip. So there was nothing to do but start at the distaff end and completely remove the outlet, leaving nothing but pig-tailed wires. There was a pretty general feeling that time was just being wasted, but what else could they do? Every breaker in the panel or things-the-breakers-snapped-into was in (literally) brand-new condition. So by definition the problem had to be (1) in one or more of the outlets or contents; or (2) in the actual wiring that ran from one thing to the next.
True, the sheetrock around the panel—which had been practically soaked into mush—had been replaced, but this tripping anomaly had surfaced days before that work was done, so there could be no post hoc ergo prompter hoc (one thing came after another so the first thing caused the second) at work.
So one by one each and every outlet in the string was taken off-line until there was nothing but about an 8’ length of Romex that ran from the main panel, through the studs of one wall of the darkroom to the first outlet. Which had been disconnected.
And STILL: That same reset-trip-reset-hold; trip sequence. The only differences were that (1) the length of time before the last “trip” in the sequence was getting longer—sometimes it would hold for most of a day; and (2) from one of the electricians I learned a few new curses that would have come in handy when the tub was spiraling up the stairs.
It was the electrical apprentice who noticed—for whatever it was worth, if anything—that the wires feeding every circuit came into the panel from the sides, top, or back. Except one. One and only one came in from the bottom. And sure enough: It was The One.
But so what? What could that POSSIBLY have to do with the price of eggs in China?
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Having no better idea, and with the meter running, the electrical contractor disconnected the one set of wires that came up from the panel bottom from their respective breakers and hooked up some kind of 100,000-volt, small-number microamp gizmo he’d made to the “hot” and “common” wires, shot the juice to it, and with a stethoscope-like device listened as he moved the round disc sensor inch-by-inch across the clean, flat, sheetrock wall of the darkroom. And about a foot or so into the room he could clearly hear the “bzzzzzzt” sound like a mosquito with a ‘tude: Made by microamp electric arcing.
He turned his imitation lightening-maker off and with his pocket knife carefully cut through the sheet rock until the offending sheetrock screw—a nice, big, 2”-long one—was found and it could be seen that it had gone far enough into the stud to penetrate the Romex. But what, exactly, was learned? Sheetrock screws penetrate Romex all the time: They skin the insulation off the hot wire and then either skin the common or touch the bare copper ground. And the circuit trips and it stays tripped like a good dead short should. So had anything, with respect to the cause, been learned?
It was, again, the apprentice who made the connection: The entire 8’ section of Romex had been taken out, to be replaced with an (insurance-paid-for) new section, and as he was examining the piece that had been taken out the apprentice noticed that the paper wrapping around the bare copper ground wire was still damp, as one might expect it to be, coming up from the bottom of the box like that.
And suddenly it became clear: The sheet rock screw had skinned the insulation on the “hot” wire but nothing else! Only when there was sufficient moisture in the paper wrapping—having “wicked” down from the waterfall that had poured ON (and thus INTO) the Romex would the resistance between the hot side and the (normally dry) paper sheath around the bare copper ground wire drop to the point where sufficient current would trip the circuit.
But the heat from this momentary current flow also dried out the paper sheath at that point so that if you immediately reset the breaker it would hold. Until the moisture—captured and retained by the plastic coating of the Romex—would equalize and again drop the resistance enough to trip the circuit.
If this happened while no one was around the dried-out spot from the last arcing might have achieved equilibrium and become damp again so that when you reset it the moisture had been patiently waiting to spring: Reset-trip-reset-hold; trip.
And so the mystery was solved and the electrical contractor actually did spring for one honey of a bass boat. It’s about the same width as the chair I made for the lady of the house to sit on instead the side of the tub when she plucks her toe-hair. (After that experience I didn’t want the strain on the tub to crack its beautiful white enamel finish.)
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