Simpler Than Expected

[kevin_standlee]

Surprise! 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.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

My ex was an electrician and I absorbed a strange amount of electrical info from him over 23 years of marriage.

Your setup sounds like a nightmare! Glad you know its vagaries! Good luck!

[kevin_standlee]

Stuff like this is one of the reasons we were able to buy the house as cheaply as we did. (It would have been even less if we hadn't had it scooped from under us until we begged him to resell it to us, which he did, making a tidy profit by flipping in in 90 days.)

[a_cubed]

Maybe a re-wire of the upper floor at the time the garage was built? Still seems weird to put the circuit out to the garage and then back in, instead of the other way around.

[belak]

sounds like a house I lived in many years ago. The fence and sprinklers were done by the same people. Great fence builders, AWFUL with sprinklers! We found that the spigot in the back yard was fed from the sprinkler register in the front yard, then run under a walkway, around the side of the house, allll the way to the back, then under the house and then BINGO, a spigot in the back! They also installed many Ts and Ys to branch off to other sprinklers and such, rather than just cutting the old pipe out and replacing it with an inline junction! It was nuts, I was constantly in the yard on my knees, working on the pipes!

I'm happy to hear you figured out how to make it work so you could use the dryer.