Electrical insanity..

Well last night I attempted my first re-wiring job in the new house. My task was to install a GFCI 3-prong outlet in place of an old-fashioned non-grounded 2-prong outlet in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

Before I could do that, though, I had to figure out exactly which switches in the fusebox, or 'service box', went to which lights/outlets in the house, since nothing in the fusebox at all is labelled, other than a circuit for the A/C, and a circuit for the electric dryer.

Figuring out the circuits in the fusebox gave me greater appreciation for the pure, utter insanity of whoever it was who wired it up.. The house inspector had been rather amused by it during the house inspection, mainly because the wires behind the panel were pretty crowded and doubled up in weird ways, but just exactly how weird I only found out after turning each circuit off to find out what in the house was affected..

I'll post up a scan of my notes later, but suffice it to say, it makes no sense whatsoever. But at least I found out what I needed to turn off to work on this outlet in the upstairs bedroom, which was the main thing I needed to do..

When I first removed the faceplate of the outlet, which had been painted over several times, not only did the faceplate come off of the wall, but the faces of the individual outlets also pulled off of the innards of the receptacle, leaving me with the sight you see above.. Every time I so much as touched the inner receptacle, more bits and pieces fell off of it.. I was convinced it must be some kind of ancient antique receptacle, until I found a fairly modern-looking price-tag which had fallen off of it reading 89 cents, and noticed that the receptacle had been manufactured by the same company that made the GFCI I was about to install.. Didn't really give me a lot of confidence..

The next thing I noticed was that there was no electrical box behind the faceplate.. It being a late Sunday night, no hardware stores were open, so I ran down to Wal Mart who happened to have some real cheap plastic recepticle boxes.

When I got back home, I realized that there really wasn't anything there in the space where the recepticle was for the electrical box to attach to. It had some nails on it, but in order to hammer the nails into the adjacent stud in the wall, I would have had to bash out even more plaster in the wall, which I didn't really want to do. So I basically just kinda crammed the box in there after stringing the power line in through the back of it..



After attaching the wires to the outlets, and attaching the outlet to the box, it was time to try to figure out how to attach the cosmetic 'screw-less' faceplate to a box & outlets that were just basically kind of floating there, vaguely braced in place. This is undoubtedly one of the most stupidly-designed kind of outlet contraption faceplate thingies I've ever seen. And it certainly didn't help keep the box in place either.



But eventually it went on and after I turned the power back on (oh yeah, I forgot to mention I did all this work by the light of a fairly dim flashlight too) the GFCI tester actually worked and everything. Yay.

Still, there's all that mess with the holes in the wall around it, which I'll get around to patching up eventually, and the outlet is still kinda loosely held in place there. I have bought a more traditional "screws showing" faceplate to put in there, hoping the screws will also kind of help keep everything in place.. I'll probably install that and patch up the surrounding wall at the same time.

bah.