grounding outlets for computer equipment

A guest appearance by one of my favorite people -- my husband! He became rather knowledgable about old wiring during the process of rewiring our kitchen and adding outlets throughout the house. I am incredibly thankful he undertook this project, because the only thing I want to do is plug in my hair dryer and not have it shut off all the lights in the kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. Yes, that's what happens when you have one circuit for all of these things.

One electrician looked at me like I was crazy when I explained I wanted properly grounded outlets for my computers.

"All the kids up at the University just use cheater plugs. Works for them," he added.

"Yes, that's why their hard drives die after a year," I retorted.

I didn't hire him.

I called up another electrician to get an estimate on running a few new circuits. He said he could ground the existing outlets.

"How?" I asked. "The wiring is old two-wire Romex, not metal conduit. There isn't a path back to the box other than neutral. Grounding to a water pipe is not code. Are you going to run a ground back to the box?"

He explained it was a trade secret, and he wouldn't tell me how because I would tell other people or just do it myself.

Didn't hire him, either.

There are two reasons a grounded outlet is a necessity if you care about your computer at all. The first and most important reason is surge protection. The electricity in your house is very noisy. There are small variations in current and voltage *all the time*. Your computer contains components which are very sensitive to these fluctuations, and over time, plugging in to a poor electrical source will degrade these components. A surge protector is needed not so much for catastrophic events like lightening strikes, but for these everyday small surges.

Do your lights flicker when you turn on your vacuum? Having your computer on lines shared by motors is a particularly bad idea, because starting and stopping these motors create power fluctuations on the line. (This is a topic for another time.)

All but very very high-end (e.g., costing $250) surge protectors operate by directing overcurrent to ground. If you do not have an equipment ground, there is nowhere for excess voltage to go, and your protector is useless. This is why using a cheater plug to plug a three-prong power strip into a two prong outlet makes it useless as a surge protector.

As an aside, I note that the previous owners of our house replaced all the two-prong receptacles with three-prong ones, but since there is nowhere to connect the ground in the existing wiring, these are not grounded. I should note that this is both illegal and a bad idea. I will return to this in a later post.

The other reason electronics should be plugged into a properly grounded outlet is to keep the metal parts at the same potential as earth. Otherwise, current might flow if these components come into contact with something which is grounded. However, this reason is far less important than having good surge protection.

Many people misunderstand the fundamental reason for the third ground wire. It is connected to earth back at the box, either by your service being bonded to a rod buried in the ground or by being bonded to your water pipe where in enters the house, and will direct an extreme event such as lightning to earth. However, its more fundamental purpose is to provide a *low resistance* independent path back to the box. The exposed metal in your appliances should be bonded to this path through the ground wire. Should the insulation break down and these surfaces become energized, they will pass through the ground back to the box, hopefully tripping the overcurrent protection (fuse or breaker). Otherwise, if you were to become grounded and come into contact with the energized appliance, the current would flow through you.

The real estate agent had recommended installing a GFCI, either at the outlet or one at the beginning of the circuit, to take care of grounding the computer. This doesn't address the problem at all -- the GFCI prevents you from getting electrocuted in the case of a ground fault, but doesn't protect your equipment at all.

hemming and hawing

I do not sew. My mother made my clothes (and most of her clothes) when I was little. We always had handmade Halloween costumes and never had holes in our socks, shirts, pants. I always thought sewing was cool, that is, when someone else was doing it.

My mom insisted I take sewing in high school as one of my two "domestic arts" electives. (Typing was the other -- twenty girls in Catholic school uniforms pounding away on manual typewriters. Ahhh...those were the days.) I went out and spent a fortune on rather ugly fabric. White cotton with pink and grey vertical stripes. And white cotton for the shirt to match the white and pink and grey striped ankle-length skirt. For these were the 1980s, and I was wearing pink and grey eyeshadow with blue mascara, and my skirt would have been a perfect match. That is, if it didn't turn out so ugly. Ugly -- in the 80s! Yikes. It was so bad I never wore it.

I hated sewing. So much so that I got in trouble for "not taking sewing seriously" and having a bad attitude. I got a B in sewing. It was one of my only B's in high school (math was almost as hard as sewing). I think it was a courtesy B, too, because I stunk.

Fast forward to 2007. I do buttons, but that's about it. I've been known to hem my skirts with packing tape and my pants with staples. I buy clearance $5 Old Navy cargo pants and have them hemmed for $7.

So, when I bought these curtains in dark red and these curtains in circle at Ikea, I liked the fact that they didn't need to be hemmed. (Ignore the British prices -- the curtains aren't on the USA site.) Instead of hemming, there is a little magic strip that you place over a folded up hem, and then you iron on the strip. The strip bonds the two pieces of fabric folded together and voilá -- hemmed!

The truth is I'm still so scared to do it that we've had super-long curtains bunched up on the floor for months now. I'm trying to get my courage up. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. My husband just finished rehanging all the curtain rods. Now's the time.

Ack.

our poor windows...

...are marred by the detritus of years of cheap-ass blind hardware. Because the previous owners LOVED screws, we have had to unscrew and dig and pry off dozens of screws and nails. For one window in my study, I counted eleven huge screws and four nails to put up one small venetian blind.


Last night, my husband attacked one of the two remaining Philliped windows. This one was in the little bathroom. They put up their venetian blind inside the window frame, making it so much harder to get out. Just to insure that no one could ever pry it off, they used screws, nails, a block of wood, and three different fittings. Since I didn't take pictures of the other Philliped windows, I snapped a few for posterity:

Why just use screws when you can use a big-ass nail, too? Note that nail has no head.


Ah, nothing like some old drape hardware to add visual interest to the room. Note the wood block that is holding the plastic fitting into place in the window well.

I could do a bit of filling with wood putty, but the windows are pretty much damaged beyond repair. It's just cosmetic, but it's a freakin' drag.

wood you be mine, PLEASE!

OMG. I. Want. This. Book. Not only is it Taschen, which makes lovely art books, but it is vintage modern. The cover also looks like a Rothko. And it has pictures of wood grain. I just don't have room in my house for a xyloteque. Hmm, actually, maybe that's what we can do with the back room. Edit: I just don't have room PRESENTLY in my house for a xyloteque.

think electric

One of the major projects we undertook upon moving in to our house in November was the rewiring of the kitchen. I'm going to ask my husband to help me describe what was changed, but it involved new outlets, new circuits, lighting changes, and grounding everything properly.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to heartily recommend our electricians, Think Electric, a collective and progressive business managed by a young, friendly, competent, curious, hard-working, internet-savvy guy who goes by the nickname of Turtle. We LOVED them. They specialize in rewiring the 40s and 50s ranches in this neighborhood. I added a link to their website to my links list.

After missed appointments, arguments about grounding computer outlets, no callbacks, strange conversations and suspicions that we would steal "trade secrets," we decided that getting estimates from the other electricians in town was a waste of time. Luckily, we emailed (EMAILED!) Turtle, and he came out when he said he would, understood our needs, gave us a decent price, and did the job right. We ended up piling more small projects on the large one, and we gave them a big chunk of our remodeling budget. But it was worth every penny. Every time I turn on a light or plug in my vaccuum, I smile.

glass of water, anyone?

Some people suffer a house that has been completely unrenovated, abused by generations of pet owners, smokers, free-livers, and goddamn communists. OK, wait, I got carried away there. I actually like some goddamn communists and many free-livers. But I do not like a half-ass job. That's what we have here at Raccoon Tree Acres. The previous owners tried to renovate, and did a sloppy, cheap job, with materials that weren't meant to last more than 10 years and would require the same teardown and full replacement when they broke down. Because of this, we missed the chance to have insulated pipes and walls, for example. The penny wise pound foolish method of renovation.

The worst example of this we have found so far is the bathroom plumbing, all done by hand by someone who should have never lifted a pipe wrench. The plumber (after replacing the toilet held together by a brick) replaced the yucky old faucet on the master bath. While under the sink, he let us know that the rust stain that kept appearing on the sink drain was not because of a tiny well that only went to the bathroom. No, it was because someone had piped the sink with gas piping instead of water piping. All for a savings of a couple of bucks. The pipes are thus unprotected, and are rusting on the inside.

I guess I can stop taking an iron formula multivitamin now.

woman in the dunes, or how I cleaned the dryer

I'm not going to post pictures of what I found, because it makes me too mad. The previous owners were unclean. We know that. Because we know that, we move aside appliances and brush out 15 years worth of dust and cat hair and sweep up piles of kid toy pieces. We dislike this job, but we do it.

I decided to clean the vent under the dryer filter. I thought I had tackled the job when the contractors were here fixing the 15 years of dry rot caused by a leaking shower (yes, in the laundry room) and the dryer was out and available for me to scrub the vent. Not so.

I removed the lint trap, and started to brush out the mounds of lint. The texture was odd, though. It felt...sandy. I got a flashlight, and sure enough, there was a thick layer of sand mixed in with the lint, coating the vent. I pulled about a quarter cup out with the brush and swabbed at the vent with wet paper towels. Then I saw the mounds of sand at the bottom of the vent, inside the dryer.

There was a whole frickin' beach in there. I have bona fide SoCal street cred, and I know from beach sand.

I can imagine a family returning from the beach with sandy towels. You've been there, right? You shake out the towels, wash them, then dry them.

But not so in the Phillips family. Why bother with the first two steps when you can just dry the wet towels? I mean, they're wet already, right?



After folding the bendable dryer brush in all sorts of creative ways and loosening all the sandy lint along the vent, I sucked all the remaining sand up with our vaccuum hose attachment. If you don't have one of these dryer brushes, BUY ONE! They are currently stocked in Marshall's and Ross for a fraction of the retail price.

Having cleared the sand dunes, I then went outside to clean the vent access on the house. The vent flapper is, as everything plastic is in this house, broken. It's missing one of the flaps. So I went to Home Depot, bought a new vent cover, a cold air stopper vent attachment of dubious worth, and a rodent/bird keeper-outer cage cover thing for the vent cap.



As usual, not knowing what I was doing, I thought I'd do some after-the-fact research. I may return all of the above purchases and exchange them for one of these, a combo unit that promises to stop cold air, keep out various pests, and furthermore, will not blow dryery sand air directly on my car. I'd say that's worth $20. It is, right?