I don't honestly know if this is standard practice or not; I don't believe we'll be doing it if we rewire (I think there are little brackets you can buy now to attach wires to other things without drilling through them) although Don, as usual, is the final arbiter of what we're going to do in cases like this (and by "Don", I mean "Don's dad").
In any case, they lost a good part of the morning by having to do this, cutting down on how much floor work they could do, but it wasn't such a great loss, since they wound up getting a massive head start on the electrical work that needed to be done.
For those of you curious about the procedure, they first turned all the electricity off in the house (putting a severe damper on my plans to do my design homework). When you do this, and are working with the breaker box, keep in mind that the main feed into the box is still going to be live. Don't touch it. Next step was to start cutting and pulling. They did this in a mostly-organized fashion, room by room, and followed each line all the way back to the breaker box. Once a breaker was empty, they removed it from the box (sorry, I have no idea how to do this -- maybe Don will comment with his technique, since I was upstairs being cold the whole time [edit: see Don's comment here]).
A large number of breakers were emptied and removed from the box, which is a great start on the rewiring work we need to do. So, not such a loss for the morning.
3 comments:
The breakers only snap into the box. You just pull it out, nothing special about it. Just rotate them away from the middle of the breaker and they will unsnap and come out.
However...word to the wise...if you plan to fiddle in the electric box and think you know what you are doing, then leave it alone. You should know what you are doing, not think you know, when you go into the box. One wrong connection or a screwdriver hitting the man feed can lead to damage to your house or even death.
Learn, learn some more, then keep on learning. Electricity isn't something to play with.
Also even when you know what your doing have someone with you when you are fiddling with electricity. If you get a good shock (not baby one, but a "put you on your ass" shock) every second that 911 takes could be the difference between life and death. If your buddy calls 911 seconds after the shock and not minutes later after the power goes out and he/she fumbles to find you after you don't respond you'll have a much better chance.
As someone who wired the entire breaker box in our house when we built it, I'll reiterate that you have to respect electricity. Check and double check to see what's live before you mess around. You might even want to shut off the main breaker if you are doing things in the box.
Oh, and we ran wires through holes in the joists - it leaves a flatter surface for applying your finish material. But inside the walls, we usually used wire staples to attach the wires to the studs. It partly depends on code. In Florida, where I grew up (daughter of an electrician)you had to run most of your wiring through metal conduit.
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