Electrician-ing

 I am considering starting each blog post with a quote from a famous Stoic, thanks to the handy app I recently discovered.  Starting right now.

"The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts:  Therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature." - Marcus Aurelius.

 In the previous looooong post, I mentioned at some point that I intended to install a digital timer on the fart fan in the shop bathroom.  The digital timer arrived in the mail today, and I woke up quite a bit earlier than needed for night shift - so I got busy at my other job. 

 

A long time ago, I was a Navy Electrician - a pretty decent warship electrician.  But it's now been about 35 years since I routinely played with wires.  I don't really care for doing civilian wiring, but I deal with it when I have to.  Today was one of those days.  Both of the switches below had to go.

I've always had a bit of a hate/hate thing about personal safety.  Most of that has to do with the way corporations shove it down your throat.  They come out with these top-down edicts that you are never allowed to question or modify in a common-sense way.  You just have to blindly follow orders that come from some office puke, who quite often has never actually held a legitimate job.

My attitude toward corporate safety programs is that they don't really care about me at all.  What they really worry about are my widow's attorney and OSHA fines.  That's why they have safety programs that very often make no sense. 

Normally I would replace both of the above switches without shutting off the power.  That's because I'm lazy, and don't like setting up a separate light.  But I've gotten softer and wiser, and gotten tired of getting shocked, tripping breakers, and making arc tracks on my tools.  So for the first time in forever, I shut the power off and set up a drop light.

The digital timer directions were specific which terminal should receive power and which should go to the fan.  It needs constant power on the electronics side to energize the push buttons and relay, so it wouldn't work the other way around.  Halfway through the job I had to close the breaker to verify which wire was the hot one - they were both black.

Below: A quick smoke test before stuffing the wires back in the box.  The fan and light switches both worked OK.

Below:  All back together nice and tidy, with a timer on the fart fan and a new rocker switch for the light!  Still no smoke or fire, so probably a success.

One other thing arrived today, and that was the box of 8ft LED bulbs, to replace the dying fluorescents in the shop ceiling.  I'm really looking forward to having time to replace them.