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Simpler Than Expected
Oct. 5th, 2025 11:53 amSurprise! It's a post about the house.
In the summer months, we rarely use the clothes dryer because it's so warm and dry here that we can just hang stuff on a drying rack upstairs and it will dry out pretty quickly. But it's starting to cool off, and on a rare rainy (and thus more humid) day, I had cause to want to dry something more quickly. I went to put it in the dryer, pushed the start button. Nothing. Everything seemed to be connected. I hung up the jacket to dry and decided that I'd deal with it later.
This morning, when Kayla came back from breakfast, she had an idea. While we had already checked the circuit breakers on the main box and on the sub box located in the laundry room, we remembered that there is yet a third box located in the garage. Going out there, we discovered that two breakers were off. Not in the tripped position, but actually off. I turned them back on and went back into the house and upstairs where the dryer is. Sure enough, the dryer worked. I'd forgotten that for reasons that doubtless made sense to the owner of the house at the time, the electrical wiring for the garage (which is a separate building from the main house) and the upstairs floor of the main house go through a conduit that branches from the main house, goes to the garage, and then back to the main house and upstairs.
This screwball wiring works, but it's something we keep forgetting. Fixing it would be part of a much larger electrical rebuild that would probably cost many thousands of dollars, because step one would probably mean upgrading our too-small electrical service, which means a new drop from the pole and lots and lots of rewiring. We could afford it, but I'm not sure we'll ever do it, just due to the massive hassle it would involve.
In the summer months, we rarely use the clothes dryer because it's so warm and dry here that we can just hang stuff on a drying rack upstairs and it will dry out pretty quickly. But it's starting to cool off, and on a rare rainy (and thus more humid) day, I had cause to want to dry something more quickly. I went to put it in the dryer, pushed the start button. Nothing. Everything seemed to be connected. I hung up the jacket to dry and decided that I'd deal with it later.
This morning, when Kayla came back from breakfast, she had an idea. While we had already checked the circuit breakers on the main box and on the sub box located in the laundry room, we remembered that there is yet a third box located in the garage. Going out there, we discovered that two breakers were off. Not in the tripped position, but actually off. I turned them back on and went back into the house and upstairs where the dryer is. Sure enough, the dryer worked. I'd forgotten that for reasons that doubtless made sense to the owner of the house at the time, the electrical wiring for the garage (which is a separate building from the main house) and the upstairs floor of the main house go through a conduit that branches from the main house, goes to the garage, and then back to the main house and upstairs.
This screwball wiring works, but it's something we keep forgetting. Fixing it would be part of a much larger electrical rebuild that would probably cost many thousands of dollars, because step one would probably mean upgrading our too-small electrical service, which means a new drop from the pole and lots and lots of rewiring. We could afford it, but I'm not sure we'll ever do it, just due to the massive hassle it would involve.
