In the middle of editing and formatting Dennis Feucht’s July 2008 must-read
Dear Dennis column I was struck by some recent events in my household.
We live in an area where our line power supply (Hydro, as it is called here) seems to have been less than reliable in the three years we have lived here. Our full section includes a set of traffic lights on a very busy highway, and the sub-section we are on has a road with a flashing amber light – in place to try and stop people trying for a head-on crash with traffic leaving that same highway. Apart from the winter of 2006 – 2007 (when very heavy damp snow took down numerous poles), those lights have meant that our outages have been of a tolerable length, the lights being a high-priority repair item. But we still determined last year to invest in a standby generator: we hope that it will be a guarantee that we never lose power again…
That installation has been a long and tedious journey. During my transmitter station building days I would have not thought twice about doing the whole thing myself. That is no longer true, and I handed the project off as a complete turnkey job to the supplier of the generator.
Completion seemed to take forever and the worst part was the performance, or lack thereof, of the electrician. Building in the Greater Victoria area is booming. High-rise condos are going up everywhere – and selling rapidly – and there is a major shortage of skilled labor. This is to the point where the more mundane jobs, like serving in a restaurant, are continuously available, as a server who learns how to use a hammer can immediately move from $10 an hour to $40 an hour. More specialized jobs like electrical installations are in equally sparse supply given the commercial building demand. So, you take what you get, in many ways.
The supplier found the electrician, who had one of his men do the actual job: a very taciturn individual who took his sweet time. When he left, the cable to/from the generator (with power conductors out, line power in – for the sump heater – and control wires) came from the outside wall horizontally for two feet and then dropped vertically into the trench. He had fitted an additional, unnecessary, disconnect for the generator; wired up a contactor backwards (intended to disconnect the hot tub if the generator was on line) and left a mess which included shelving he'd torn out and packaging materials. He billed the generator supplier about 250% over budget. And - perhaps the final straw - he managed to fatally damage the circuit breaker for our furnace, sending my family to a hotel for nearly a week as the house rapidly chilled and we waited for the rather hard-to-find breaker, which ended up setting us back a further $500, to be ordered and express-shipped from the U.S.
Maybe two months later, after a number of other small problems had been sorted out, a safety inspector showed up. He found three faults: contactor wiring (where a 14 AWG wire had been terminated into a 200 A lug), some bonding issues, and a demand for a load demand chart. Although he issued a non-compliance order in May 2008 (with a two-week completion notice), nobody told
us anything about it. The electrician called at the beginning of July to request access to make corrections, and to ask for my help with the load chart. I refused him access.
Next thing, I am away and the safety inspector leaves a non-compliance notice on our doorstep. “As my relationship with …. has ended…” and, suddenly, I have been made responsible for this guy’s work even though I never hired him myself.
I now have to deal with someone who talks in kW for ac circuits! I am trying hard not to scream inside; very hard.
Perhaps that will be a little easier than at the PCB manufacturer in the Pacific Northwest that I talked with a few years ago. They were having problems, they said, because their client could not get a decent video signal across one of their circuit boards. But, they assured me, they had measured the impedance at 50 Ω with their test equipment. When I asked about the imaginary part of the impedance I got totally blank looks.
Thanks, Dennis; where were you when I needed you?
