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What the heck were they thinking? (electrical)

Sometimes I'm just absolutely amazed at what some people think of to do, and the extent to which they will go to do it.

The following picture shows a "renovated" property that didn't use to have a dishwasher. Since the older electric panel was already full of circuit breakers, and replacing it with a larger panel would have cost more money, they came up with this ingenious way to wire the place for a dishwasher.

Keep in mind that this is in the foundation crawl space, and the circuit breaker at the electric panel was merely labeled "kitchen." The more humid environment is bound to play havoc with those exposed wire splices, but at least they did label the splices, and with indelible pen, too!

Electric foundation

Posted by Russel Ray, San Diego home inspector on 08/04/2008 07:33 PM

Comments (12)

Electricity in the ActiveRain Channel

foundation, electric, dishwasher, refrigerator, outlets, kitchen, renovation, rehab, renovate

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12 Comments on What the heck were they thinking? (electrical)

AUG

2008

Russel - I am saying the same thing. What are these people thinking when they do these work at the house?

Thanks Russell for sharing this engenious, dangerous and illegal home owner solution. Just another example of why one should always buy subject to inspection.

Paul

I guess no one told them about using a sub-panel.

Thanks Russel I would love to be able to use this picture the next time i have a client say do i really need a home inspection? (after having explained alot of the issues that can happen if you dont have the inspection). This is a real eye opener.

Thanks for stopping by, everyone. I've got lots of interesting renovation pictures that I'll share as time permits. Readers should feel free to use information or pictures in my blogs to help their Clients. Helping people is much more important to me than enforcing copyrights, etc. I'm just a free-wheelin' guy.

Ellie - I thought at some point I would get tired of saying the same thing over and over and over again, but as with the person who keeps trying to build a better mousetrap, people keep getting more and more creative, and since there are six billion people on Earth, that's a lot of creativity.

Paul - I wish you could have seen the actual interior of the house. It was gorgeous. No one would have thought that interesting things were just a few inches below.

Anthon - Is your name spelled right? I get taken to task quite often by fellow inspectors because I use the terms "subpanel" and "main panel." The "main panel" actually is the "service equipment" and all "panels," "main" and "sub" are simply "electric panels." I always try to use terminology that my Clients are familiar with, and everyone I've ever run into knows what a main panel and a subpanel are. A parallel anaology would be the use of the term "water closet." Anyone know what a "water closet" is? I would never put "water closet" in my home inspection reports. I'd have every Client calling me to ask me what it is, and I have much better things to do than to answer questions that don't really need to be asked if one writes properly.

Marie - Again, feel free to use information and pictures in my blogs to help you and your Clients.

Check out the other informative blogs below, especially the laundry blog.

I would give the guy an A for marking the stuff and an S for stupid for the rest.

Lol That's something else RR! I wish, back when I was a warranty inspector for builders, that I took pictures of some of the absurd things I saw. The pics would be great for the all too often question "why would I need to get an inspection on a brand new house".

Russel it is a little hard to tell what they had in mind with all those wires, but whatever it was its wrong now.

Russell,

Did you get the comment from the sellers and the sellers agent..... IT'S WORKING !!!

AUG

2008

Thanks for stopping by, Folks!

Gene - You could make an acronym out of "A for marking the stuff and an S for stupid." LOL

Kevin - Yeah, I'd like to have a lot of videos and pictures of interesting stuff I've seen in my real estate life. I had a hard drive crash in August 2005 and lost a lot of stuff because my ghosting software wasn't ghosting. I did have a lot of stuff already saved on CDs, so there's more coming. Check out today's blog on renovating around that stupid water heater.

Charles - Some of the "wires" you see there are actually very thick cobwebs. I did like the way they wired everything in series though.

Rick - Actually, the comment I got was, "Is everything working?" but it came from the Buyers with a look of amazement on their faces.

Yup, it's Anthony without the 'y'. And as an added twist, the 'h' is silent.

Thanks for pointing out my lapse. I try to avoid jargon, but at the same time, I need to be reminded that there are more technically specific names which avoid confusion. In this case, I could have said, "adding a sub distribution panel".

OCT

Mamma Mia! And that's under the house! Who in their right mind would do that kind of work under a house, much less expect anyone else to get to it?

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