Half-A** Work Yields Whole-A** Problems

I love fixing things. I like to take them apart, tinker with them, fix/replace whatever is wrong/broken, put them back together, and have it all working again. Things used to be built in such a way that it made more sense to fix things rather than replace them. As you have seen in my woodworking shop posts, I have a thing for old woodworking machinery and look forward to getting them all running and looking like they were the day they were new. Yes, I actually just indirectly longed for the good ol’ days.

I’m getting older. Dang it.

As a good example of how far we’ve come as a society, I was in Lowe’s the other day getting some wire to re-plug some of those tools, and was discussing this very same topic with my 8 year-old. As a test, I asked him, “Ok, son, what do you do if something breaks?” His reply shouldn’t have shocked me, “You throw it away and get another one.” Sigh.

The same principle applies to people, in a way. Things were built a certain way back then, and people took pride in keeping their things in good working order. Likewise, they took pride in their work and wanted to make sure the job was done right the first time. That’s how it was in my household. I learned the term ‘half-a**’ at a fairly young age and it has always stuck with me. For ease of writing, let’s just call it a ‘halfer’. Kinda like a heifer, but completely unrelated to cows in any way. In fact it’s completely unlike heifers. Moving on…

At any rate, my dad over-engineered every thing he ever touched, and he instilled that same mindset in me, so when I see work that was half-hearted or lazily done, it gets under my skin.(Incidentally, if you are like this don’t ever build a house because you will quite possibly go insane with what you see. Then again, you also get the opportunity to correct it as you see it, so…)

Sometimes, however, even I slip up. Some back-story…

The other day I finally got a chance to fix an underground electrical problem that’s plagued us off and on for a year. When we had the house built, we wanted electricity run to the road so we could have lights on our driveway posts as well as receptacles for Christmas lights. I ran all the wire before they poured the concrete and set the stone, and then as luck would have it the contractors that installed the fiber cable for phone/Internet were nice enough to bury my electrical wire for me, so I didn’t have to worry about trenching 200′ of the front yard. I just needed to combine the wire they buried with the one that I pre-installed into a junction box. All was well for a few months and then the breaker started tripping periodically – like every few days. I didn’t think it was my junction box, but I was willing to be proved wrong, so I dug it up.

Dug??

Yeah…so despite me not finding a single instance of someone online burying a junction box I figured I’d be the first to make it work. I just didn’t want this junction box sitting above ground where we could hit it, see it, etc. I thought I did a good job. I thought I took enough precautions. I connected the wires inside the box, and coated their ends with liquid electrical tape to fill in every gap in the wire nut. I closed up the box using a foam-lined lid. Then, as a final ‘I got this’ effort, I took a can of Great Stuff foam, jammed the straw inside the bottom of the box and held the trigger until it started coming out the bottom. It was totally waterproof.

Yeah, I know. I literally thought this would work.

So anyway, I dug it up. Here’s what I found.

Not so waterproof after all as you can see. I pulled up some of the wire, got a new box, mounted it above ground on a 2×4 with conduit protecting the wires, and now it practically blends in with the flower bed. Again – halfer job to begin with led to a whole lot of problems. Fixing it the right way yielded much nicer results, and the breaker hasn’t tripped since.

End of story? Hardly.

A month ago, we noticed the lights at the end of the driveway were out. Again. The breaker wasn’t tripping, and the ground fault wasn’t tripping, so I was dumbfounded. I looked at everything I could until finally I narrowed it down to being a problem under ground within 10 feet of the breaker box.

Strange.

I disconnected the wire and began to pull it up until this little gem came into my view.

Yes, that’s electrical tape wrapped around the underground wire. And no, I didn’t do that. Now, while I fully admit that my attempt at burying the junction box was foolish, ill-advised, and simply wrong to do, at least I made an effort to prevent water from entering the live wires. Some idiot, however, must have nicked my wire and then taped it over, buried it, and called it a day.

I was furious.

To confirm my suspicions, I brushed off the dirt, kept it above ground and then flipped the breaker back on.

BOOM.

I don’t mean ‘pop’ or ‘zap’. I mean BOOM. A huge flash of light came right from the taped area, the breaker tripped, and the next thing I realize is that I needed clean pants.

Ok, not really, but the boom was real.

After first blaming the contractors who installed the wire, I eventually remembered that our electrical problems arose when the sprinkler system installers were doing their work. It doesn’t really matter at this point, but it’s my theory that they nicked it while digging their trenches in the flower bed, covered it up, and didn’t tell me about it. Meanwhile, as they tested and saturated the ground over and over, they kept shorting it out through the tape, thus tripping the breaker. I dug up and fixed my effort at the driveway, but it only fixed half the actual problem. Now I’m fixing it all the right way, and hopefully this won’t yield another blog post in the future.

So, kids, what’s the moral of today’s story? Do things right the first time. Take pride in your work. Don’t do things half way; otherwise you end up with a whole lotta problem. Don’t go against the advice of dozens of electricians online and think you can outsmart them by burying a junction box. (Seriously, who does that?)

Oh, and wash your hands before dinner and brush your teeth before bed. Ok, so those were actually for my kids…