Coming Soon, parts 3 and 4

Hi, I’ve been booked up, will be adding part 3 and 4 re surge protection ASAP, I hope this weekend, thanks, Gary

Lightning Surge Arrestors and Protectors Part #2

How And Where Can I Get A Surge Protection Device? Who Installs Them?

How and where can you procure your own surge protection device? Your local electrical contractor carries them and is ready to install one for your home or business. As an electrical contractor in the greater Milwaukee area, I have installed many lighting surge arrestors and TVSS’s over the past 34 years. I have seen the quality and the capacity of surge arrestors drastically improve over the years.

The service panel or service entrance surge protection device, a stage 1 device, this is a unit that your local electrical contractor will send his electrician out to your building or equipment to install. This equipment is not safe or suitable for the homeowner or handyman to install.

The basic second stage surge protection device is usually a power strip with built in surge protection that anyone can install simply by plugging it in. They are usually power strips with some basic level of surge protection. They are good to have and are easy to install at a point of use as in the home entertainment area. This is something a homeowner can install themselves, especially for their expensive electronics. Surge protection only works if you have a good grounding system in the building. Grounding is critical in any electrical system, but with surge protection, grounding is all-important. Without excellent grounding, the surge voltage has nowhere to go. This is another reason why it is important to have an electrician examine your electrical and grounding system.

There is another type of surge protection device used by the power company; they are called primary surge protection devices. The outside wireman from the local utility installs these devices on their equipment to protect their primary supply side equipment. Usually every transformer has a primary surge protection device.

Surge protection devices are the cheapest insurance a homeowner or business can get for their electrical loads, appliances, and electronic devices. The nominal cost for a first stage surge protection device on a home or business panel will usually save you several time the cost in saved appliances, electronics, and motors.
What Is Clamping voltage?

Clamping voltage or what is also known as the let-through voltage, specifies what spike voltage will cause the protective components inside a surge protector to divert unwanted energy from the protected line.[2] A lower clamping voltage indicates better protection, but can sometimes result in a shorter life expectancy for the overall protective system. The lowest three levels of protection defined in the UL rating are 330 V, 400 V and 500 V. The standard let-through voltage for 120 V AC devices is 330 volts.

Clamping voltage is important, it is better to spend enough on a surge arrestor to provide you with proper protection; you get what you pay for. You want something that works, and works fast. Surges are usually in the nano seconds, so you need a surge protection that will operate that fast and heavy enough to handle multiple surges, even hundreds and thousands of surges.

Part 3 in the works

Lightning Surge Arrestors and Protectors Part #1

Wikipedia defines it as, “A lightning arrester is a device used on electrical power systems to protect the insulation on the system from the damaging effect of lightning.”
Metal oxide varistors (MOVs) have been used for power system protection since the mid 1970s. The traditional lightning arrester commonly referred to or also known as surge arrester, had a high voltage terminal and a ground terminal.

When a surge: lightning surge or switching surge, travels out or down the power system to the arrester, the current from the surge is diverted around the protected insulation in most cases to earth. The arrestor senses the over voltage and instead of allowing it to travel through the supply system and damaging electrical loads such as appliances and electronics, it I shorted to the ground. This is why your power often goes out for a second when there is a close by lighting surge. You are actually seeing in real time either your lighting surge arrestor actually working or you are seeing the power company primary lighting surge arrestor operating and protecting your electrical equipment. So do not think of your blinking lights are a bad thing, it is actually a very good thing.

Do You Know What A Surge Protector Is?

From Wikipedia: “A surge protector (or surge suppressor) is an appliance designed to protect electrical devices from voltage spikes. A surge protector attempts to limit the voltage supplied to an electric device by either blocking or by shorting to ground any unwanted voltages above a safe threshold.”

This article primarily discusses specifications and components relevant to the type of protector that diverts (shorts) a voltage spike to ground; however, there is some coverage of other methods.

The preferred terminology today is Surge Protection Device (SPD). The obsolescent term from the previous two decades is Transient Voltage Surge Suppressor (TVSS). Both of these terms are used to describe electrical devices typically installed in power distribution panels, process control systems, communications systems, and other heavy-duty industrial systems, commercial systems, residential systems, industrial, institutional, and military. Their designed purpose is to protect against electrical surges and spikes, including those caused by lightning and utility company customers.

There are numerous scaled-down versions of these devices. They are installed in every imaginable application from agricultural, residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, military applications, to space industry applications. Most of the time, surge protectors are installed at the service entrance electrical panels, to protect equipment down line and protect against voltage surges that would otherwise create electrical damage if not an electrical hazard.

Many power strips have basic surge protection built in; these are typically clearly labeled as such. However, persons who do not understand their purpose and function sometimes erroneously refer to power strips that do not provide surge protection as “surge protectors”.

In an age when electrical appliances dominate the house, be it the kitchen, the bathroom or the many technical appliances used to give the drawing room a better look, a primary concern is the concept of surge protection. This is especially true when you connect a device to anything from a low to a high voltage electrical system. As the gadgets are most vulnerable to surges and spikes, the requirement of protection measures becomes necessary.

One of the measures that you need to take to assure the safety of your gadgets is installing a lightning surge arrestor. Sometimes a lightning surge arrestor goes by the name of surge arrestors and these work on the insulation of your electrical power systems. Since the 1970s, metal oxide varistors (MOV) have been used in measures for power system protection; MOV’s are the backbone of most lightning surge arrestors.

Part 2 continued tomorrow.

Integrity, Honesty, and Electrical Contracting

I was recently on an estimate in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin on a recent Saturday. A Wauwatosa homeowner had called me since I was a State and Wauwatosa Licensed Electrical Contractor and Master Electrician. Guess what kind of problem he called me for? Another contractor’s mistake that damaged his garage feed from the house.

The homeowner just had a new concrete patio poured in his backyard. It was adjacent to the garage. When the mason contractor or concrete contractor excavated for the patio, he dug up a ½” rigid conduit from the house feeding the 20-ampere 120-volt circuit on the garage. I was shocked when the homeowner told me what the mason said in his defense of his mistake. It takes integrity to be honest and not BS your way out of a mistake one makes. When I looked at the job on Saturday afternoon, I saw 10 feet of rigid conduit laying bent up on the surface of the ground in the back yard, near the garage.

First lie: the concrete contractor said it was an unused pipe, nothing was in it. This occurred on a Friday. Friday morning, the light, and the garage door opener were working. Friday night, the garage door did not open, the light did not turn on, nor did the garage door open that night. The contractor poured his concrete before replacing the conduit and replacing the copper wire from the house to the garage. How foolish, he just created seven times as much work to repair the power outage.

Second lie: next, the concrete contractor denied responsibility for the damage to the conduit and the power outage to the garage saying the pipe was too shallow. Code requires rigid to be at least 6 inches below grade, I didn’t dig to see what the pipe depth was but if they used rigid conduit, which is what it looked like, it was probably done by an electrician and it was probably deep enough. When I see homeowners and handymen doing garage wiring, they either use cable or EMT, an indoor or above grade type conduit not approved for direct burial. As a concrete patio contractor and with 30 years experience pouring concrete as he claimed, he should have known to take a minute and notice the exposed conduit between at both the house and the garage, before he started the excavation. I personally do not like contractors or people that have little if any integrity, it gives many contractors bad names.

What good is a person if his or her word cannot be trusted? Our society is based upon trust. In order to deal with people with honesty or integrity, one’s word should be one’s bond; one’s word should be as good as gold. The mason used for the patio pour lacks any shred of honesty and casts a shadow of doubt on all contractors. One has to be very careful who they hire for any work, electrical work or otherwise, around their home or business.
When I think of honesty and integrity, I think of two things in particular. One is the many Bible verses I have read and heard preached about honesty and integrity. The second thing is Lt. William Kelly regarding his lies regarding the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam. If Lt. Kelly was just honest to begin with, he would not have dug such a deep hole for himself and cast such a dark shadow upon the men and women who proudly wore uniform with honesty and integrity in the military. I was in the USAF stationed in Okinawa several years after the time Lt. Kelly made all of the bad news. Even several years later, the USAF stressed to all of the airmen for the need to maintain absolute integrity in all we said and did. Those same lessons and those same Bible verses are part of every word we speak and part of every job we perform. Without integrity, you have nothing.

Milwaukee Electrician Bakes In The Hot Summer Attic — Part #2

Milwaukee Electrician Bakes In The Hot Summer Attic — Part #2

or “Attitude Is Everything – Part 2”

The homeowner provided a broom to help clear away the blown in insulation from the electrical junction boxes buried under the blown insulation, what we typically find in attics with blown in insulation. I was thankful it was cellulose insulation and not blown in fiberglass insulation – pure scratchy misery in the hot weather.

It took me what seemed like hours but I found the cable from the first floor light fixture but disconnecting the light fixture on the first floor, disconnecting the power for the lighting circuit, opening up all of the spliced hot or switched conductors and connecting a low voltage tone generator at the fixture wires. I than used the tone receiver and was able to identify the particular wire and cable. The attic was full of cables. The groups of cables almost looked like plain spaghetti.

Once I found the cable, it was easy installing another cable with a switch-leg to feed the cable feeding the first floor hallway light fixture. I installed a short cable from the second floor fixture box with the switch leg and connected it to the cable from the first floor light fixture, so now that fixture was now connected to the switch-leg.

The homeowner and his wife are both IT gurus, not electricians. Did the other electrician figure an IT expert would be able to figure out the attic three-way switching and connections? I do not know, I would not think so, that was the electrician’s job, a job the previous electrician from a year earlier did not do himself. Bad day maybe? His heart not into the work? Maybe de did not want to do any attic work, or maybe he was a prema donna, When a person loses his interest in his job, he or she is bordering on becoming worthless at that job. Attitude is everything.

Sometimes electricians get confused on three-way switching. There are nine basic ways three-way switching could be wired and probably hundreds of ways they could be wired wrong. The books you might find in the library or the big box stores only give you enough information to get in trouble. Electricians are usually writing those books from their perspective, not with the detail and basics needed for a beginner to understand the books and the codes for a safe installation.

Anyway, after I disconnected my low voltage generator and reconnected the light fixture in the first floor hallway, the homeowner energized the circuit and the hallway light fixtures were both operating perfectly from both three-way wall switches. My attic work was done and the homeowner had their lighting working properly, Hallelujah!

By the way, the picture above of the baked electrician is me enjoying my steam room like attic. The rest of the day felt very cool!

Milwaukee Electrician Bakes In The Hot Summer Attic — Part #1

Hot and Steamy

What else could I call this article? Baked Electrician? Sunnyside Up? Some Like It Hot? Attitude Is Everything. Attitude Determines Your Altitude! I guess they would all suffice as alternate titles. Anyway, Last Saturday I worked in a customer’s home. During the first hour or two, I spent inspecting all of the wiring, mostly old wiring and handyman wiring. I told the customer that this electrical work would take at least two or three weeks to repair, replace, and correct everything. I asked the owner about his priority for the work to be done.

The customer’s top priority was correcting the three-way wiring between the first floor hallway lighting and the second floor hallway lighting. The homeowner had another electrician help him a year earlier. They were able to pull a cable from the new first floor hallway fixture that was added a year earlier to the attic via the basement. The strange thing about this was the electrician stopped there. He never finished the job he started. The other electrician left the hardest part of the job to the homeowner to figure out which box to tie the cable into and which wire to connect the new cable too. That was very poor service to a very nice homeowner.

The homeowner did find a hot conductor but he was not able to find the switch-leg so the new first floor light fixture would turn on and off with the second floor light fixture, both off of the two three-way switches. Since the homeowner tied his new cable feeding the new first floor light fixture unto a hot conductor, the light fixture was always on. What good did the other electrician do?

Anyway, the temperature outside was 90 degrees, I knew the attic would be hot. There was a passive attic vent in the roof, another smaller passive vent but way too tiny to allow an adequate cross flow of air for ventilation. The attic was hot and humid, even painfully hot but I needed to find the cable and correct the wiring so both lights operated off the two three-way light switches. As I crawled around in the attic, I thought how hot, humid, and miserable it was in the attic. I told myself I should just think of it as the steam room I use at Bally’s Total Fitness in my spare time, spare time I seldom have. I know a steam room is 110 degrees to 120 degrees with 100% humidity, this attic was a lot hotter. I would guess it was 140 degees but I did not get my thermocouple temperature probe from my electrical service van. As soon as I did that, my attitude changed for the better, the bonus was it felt like the temperature instantly dropped 20 degrees to feel more like the steam room and less like an oven. It was now tolerable. Attitude is everything.

Part 2 Tomorrow:

Late Night Electrical Emergency In Milwaukee, WI Part 2

80% of fires are caused my wiring, a handyman improperly installed this receptacle.

There are floor receptacles with approved floor boxes and approved covers for the particular floor box, this one was not an approved type of box for the installation, neither was there a cover. How does one install a receptacle on a kitchen floor and not think there will be a problem? It was just another handyman job butchered up for an unsuspecting homeowner. Just because a handyman may know enough about electricity to make a light turn on or a receptacle provide power for a load that does not mean the handyman job is safe for people or the building. Bad wiring or improper wiring installation causes 80% of electrical fires.

Is it worth getting a cheap electrical installation at the risk of burning down the house? I do not think so, but this customer inherited this problem when she bought the house. It was a normal cut in box for a wall with a normal duplex receptacle. Since this receptacle was on the floor, it was only time before something would happen, and it did, twice. When I first looked at the receptacle, I looked at a pile of fire extinguisher powder. Either the homeowner or the MFD emptied a fire extinguisher to smother the smoke and fire coming from the burned up electrical receptacle and insulation on the wire. The circuit breaker never tripped when the receptacle was burning up. The MFD turned off the breakers, that’s the first thing the home owner should have done but under the panic of a 4th of July fireworks display coming from the receptacle, the thought never entered the panicked homeowners mind. The MFD turned off all of the power for both units of this duplex. If this kitchen receptacle had the proper GFCI receptacle, the GFCI would have tripped. Any electrician knows this, a handyman often does not. Most home owners have the sense not to work on their own wiring, it seems to me most handymen have not come to that understanding.

When I got there, the floor receptacle had indeed burned up pretty badly and it had the typical burned carbon smell. I removed the burned up receptacle and cable. I let the homeowner smell the receptacle for future reference; it had the classical electrical carbon burn smell that electricity always creates. After I snipped the receptacle and cable out of the box, I went down to the basement and found the box. I pulled on the cable and it fell right out of the box, the handyman never secured the electrical cable to the cut-in box he unfortunately installed in the floor. I removed the 15-amp cable to the first junction box. I turned on the circuit breakers for both units of the duplex and the power was restored, the lights came on, and the alarm made its beep. I wrote up a proposal for a new 20 ampere, 120-volt circuit with a GFCI duplex to be installed in the wall above the gas range.

It is typical for a handy to create an unsafe electrical condition. Electricians go through an apprenticeship for a minimum of 4 to 5 years but often several years. Besides the apprenticeship, continuing education is required to maintain one’s credentials. The national Electrical Code, NEC, updates and changes every three years. States and local communities will also modify their codes to comply with the new codes but they are usually more restrictive than the NEC. The NEC is nothing but the minimum standard allowed for an installation. A handyman installation never meets the minimum standard for a safe electrical installation. Are you safety worth having a qualified electrical contractor send his qualified electrician or electricians to your home or business? For me and my house, I only want qualified electricians doing electrical work.

Late Night Electrical Emergency In Milwaukee, WI Part 1

When she called me, she was initially vague saying, “You just have to cap a floor outlet off”. I gave her the standard morning diagnostic price to come out and correct the wiring but she wanted to have the work taken care of ASAP. She gave me her address, phone numbers, and explained she revealed she had a floor receptacle that started sparking.

When I arrived at the job, I was concerned about three security issues. 1) There was not any driveway to park in. I parked on the poorly lit street with my emergency electrician’s service vehicle. 2) In front of the house and my parking space, there was an unusually large bush by a tree between the sidewalk and the road; it looked like a good place for people to hide behind when they are up to no good. 3) There was another large group of overgrown bushes in front of the yard in about the same area, another good hiding place.

I used my Rayovac Sportsman high power 2/4 watt flashlight to examine the bushes just in case there were any perpetrators hiding in the bushes. The north side of Milwaukee is not the safest place in the world during daylight hours, at night it becomes more dangerous. This past weekend, there were 5 murders in 5 hours, that was unusual but still, I don’t want to be a statistic if I can avoid it by remaining alert and especially not walking into a bad situation,…

As it turned out, the Milwaukee Fire Department (MFD) had just been out for the second time in a month. The electrical floor receptacle that was causing the problem was thought to be de-energized. Just one month earlier, she had the Milwaukee Fire Department come out and they turned off two kitchen circuit breakers, and they said to keep them off. The homeowner did as she was told. The problem, the firefighter was wrong about the circuit breakers to turn off and the floor receptacle was still energized and on the edge of burning up. Last night as the owner was mopping the kitchen floor, some of the floor cleaner and water went into the receptacle on the floor. Just ask the owner, she will tell you that moisture and water do not mix well. She has a new appreciation for electricity now,…

Part 2 tomorrow

Only Hire Qualified Electrical Contractors and Electricians

As you may see from the photo, we are dealing with a commercial building with a flat roof. Typically, a commercial building with a flat roof will use commercial rooftop units. I can only imagine that this might be a small strip mall full of small shops or stores, small stores for the normal commercial unit. Looking at this photo, it does not appear that either a qualified electrical contractor or qualified electricians, or a qualified HVAC technician was ever used on this job.

As you can see, most of the units look old, rusty, and ill maintained. The A/C unit on the right has a 5 gallon plastic bucket holding up a disconnect, that’s not installed professionally per code, certainly it isn’t secured. I have to wonder about a hundred other potential violation like proper wire size, grounding size and connections, proper fuse size, the type of wire used, bushings used, tightness of fittings insuring a good bond,… Also, the 6″x6″ or 8’x8″ wire trough in the front is missing the covers, I don’t even see them laying on the deck.

Did you notice the conduit on the left side and in front of the trough? What a nightmare, apparently no one on this jobs worries about the NEC, National Electrical Code here. The conduit behind the trough running away from the trough also appears to just be left laying on the deck instead of being properly secured to deck boards but it is possible something is there, just not visible on the photo.

Is the wiring water resistant wiring? Are the connections inside the trough water resistant? The trough also looks bent in the middle, clearly very poor maintenance here and I would have to question the qualification of the mechanics and tradesmen on this job. I also have to wonder if the owner is aware of the problem on the roof and of this is typical of the work inside the building. If it is, you have a lot of unsafe condition endangering people and increasing the fire and electrical risk to people and buildings.

When a person hires a contractor, they should not have to worry about the ability to do a job correctly and safely. Always hire qualified tradesmen to do your installations. If the work doesn’t look professionally installed, it probably wasn’t. New installations usually require a permit and inspection if you’re in the city, if you live in the stick, that may not exist.