My wife finally succumbed to peer pressure and started her own LiveJournal. Largely, this was a result of not wanting to repeat herself every time someone wants a status report on recent events in our little family, particularly our latest electrical and plumbing fiasco.
Speaking of which, the long form of the electrical nightmare is thus:
On Saturday, 24 January, our cable TV started to go on the fritz. At first, it was just intermittent service, but by Sunday, the cable had gone completely, including our cable Internet service. We called Comcast to have one of their technicians come out and get things up and running again.
Tuesday, 27 January rolls around, and the cable guy shows up to repair the cable. I was occupying myself by playing Ratchet and Clank while he puttered about. He went outside to fiddle with the cable box. Suddenly, Ratchet and Clank disappeared as most of the breakers in the house slammed firmly to the “off” state. I dashed downstairs to the breaker box to see what’s going on, and noticed great gouts of black smoke pouring forth from the TV, VCR, and cable box in Zen’s room.
After quickly turning off the mains and unplugging the burning A/V wreckage, I ran outside to see what the hell the cable guy was doing. He said that he got a big ol’ blue spark when he disconnected the cable from the house, and then all the power went dead a half a minute later (which would have been me turning off the mains). Before the power went dead, he touched a few spots in the cable box with a multimeter and found out that the entire house had been grounding through the cable. This is, as they say, a Bad Thing.
The cable technician climbed the pole across the street and found that about two feet of the cable had been fried, burning its way through the insulation from the inside out. That explained our lack of cable signal, but not why the house had been grounding through the cable in the first place. After repairing the cable to the pole, he let me know that I’d need to get the house electrical system repaired before Comcast would hook another wire to our house. That seemed perfectly reasonable to me, given the extra crispy nature of the cable that he replaced.
I called an electrician, who showed up later that afternoon. After unplugging everything I could think of in the house, we turned the mains back on, and he went about the house with a multimeter, getting a more and more confused look on his face the longer he tested outlets, switch plates, and lighting fixtures. At one point, with multimeter attached to a nearby outlet, he got a completely different reading every time he switched the same circuit on and off. Given the ordinarily binary nature of turning a single circuit on and off, this was disturbing, to say the least.
He came just shy of pronouncing the house possessed and recommending that I find a good priest and some holy water. Instead, he suggested that the house probably needed to be completely rewired, and that at a rough guess I could expect to pay US$15,000 for the privilege and that such a job could take a few months to complete. Yuck.
Elisabeth, Zen, and I gathered a small percentage of our worldly goods and moved into Elisabeth’s mom’s place for the remainder of the week while we talked to other electricians and the insurance company and figured out what the hell we were going to do. We also discovered that Azymuth, one of our cats, had gone missing during the day, which we attributed to not having nearly enough to stress out about. He turned up a couple days later; apparently, he’d just gone to ground somewhere inside the house and just refused to have anything to do with people who weren’t capable of keeping a house’s electrical system in working order.
Over the course of the week, we found some more competent electricians in the form of Green Lake Electric, who I highly recommend to anyone in the Seattle area in need of electrical work (more on that later). They went through the house with Elisabeth and completely mapped its strange new electrical topography. Many heads were scratched and many theories were put forward on what had happened. The only thing anyone could agree upon is that the house had lost its neutral, but nobody could quite guess why. At this stage, the electricians said that they may need to rip up several walls to find which junctions had been fried, because the only thing that seemed capable of causing the weird results they were getting was one or more short circuits in places they couldn’t get to.
We moved from Elisabeth’s mom’s place to Ken’s place, convinced so far by the experts that we were in for an extended period of not living at home. By far the best statement from an electrician during this time was that, in the few rare cases they’d seen something similar to what had happened to our home, the problem was usually discovered when the roof caught fire. Without a proper ground, something in a wall somewhere tended to heat up and ignite the house’s insulation, racing up the wall and turning the upper part of the house into a raging inferno. Apparently, fate smiles upon geeks and tea shop owners, because the worst that happened was the loss of several appliances (refrigerator, chest freezer, toaster), some A/V equipment (two cable boxes, a TV, a VCR), and a couple of computers (whose hard drives miraculously survived).
The nice folks from Allstate sent a claims adjuster over to assess how much of this mess would be covered under insurance. While he was at the house with Elisabeth and one of the electricians, an inspector from Seattle City Light dropped by so the city could add its two cents to the mounting price tag. A grizzled veteran of electrical work, he took a look at something that everyone else had assumed was perfectly fine: the power line from the pole to the house. The clouds parted (literally), and he was able to spy a point on the line where the beautiful magnolia tree in front of our house had eaten its way through the neutral line. It was so subtle that when the weather turned grey again, one could hardly see the place where the line was damaged. At long last, we had a root cause (branch cause, perhaps?) for the whole mess.
At this point, I feel it necessary to mention what a great guy our insurance agent is. David Olliver secured for us a home owner’s policy that provided not only compensation for repairs to the electrical system, not only money to purchase damaged and destroyed appliances, but also enough to cover the cost of bringing the house up to current electrical code, a requirement when such a massive amount of electrical work must be done to a house. Our electrical system, originally installed in 1928 and further mangled by a former owner some time during the 50s, was well behind code, requiring the installation of more than a dozen new outlets and light switches, along with a smoke detector system. All of it covered by insurance. Thank you, David.
In addition, the insurance covered lodging in a hotel. We moved from Ken’s to our semi-permanent base of operations at the Marriott Residence Inn on the south shore of Lake Union, near downtown Seattle. It was an improvement in commute from Ken’s place in Issaquah for all three of us, and they had no problem with taking in Storm, as well. It takes a lot of guts for a hotel to allow guests to board a Basenji, and we salute the bravery of the fine folks at Marriott. With the cats being taken care of by another friend, Karen, we settled into something approximating normalcy while the electrical contractors did their thing.
Another inspector from the city performed an impedance test, and it turned out that, while not the root cause of the problem, the old knob and tube wiring had been completely fried during the incident, and needed to be replaced. Fortunately, the guys at Green Lake Electric are true pros, and they were able to replace the old wiring and bring the rest of the house up to code in less than a week. On top of it all, they left such tiny holes where they did their work that it won’t be hard, or terribly expensive, for someone else to come in and repair the walls. Again, I highly recommend Green Lake Electric; these guys rock.
We moved back into the house last Saturday (14 February) after 17 days away from the house. We’ve got a refrigerator again, and with a little work yesterday, we’ve got some of the house back to normal. There are still stacks of boxes in the basement and elsewhere in the house that contain the contents of whole rooms (moved aside to allow the electricians space to work), but we’re slowly getting back to normal. We’ve just hit a small snag with a plumbing problem, about which Elisabeth goes into great detail in her LiveJournal.
If there’s a moral to the story, it’s probably to make sure your insurance agent is a genius. We’ve still got a fair amount of out-of-pocket expense due to this little adventure, but no so much that we need to consider donating important organs to make up the cost.
