A Really Bad Idea - Installing A Dimmer Switch

I have a life outside of writing and I devote a significant amount of time to it. I don’t have a choice really, we live on a fairly large property which is as demanding as a government tax auditor and I spend a considerable amount of time mowing the lawn, cutting dead tree limbs, trimming stuff that seems to grow despite periods of drought and fixing stuff. There is always something to repair, fix, change or replace.

I wrote a couple of months ago about the joy of assembling the new barbeque we bought to replace the one we had. For those of you who missed that article, it can be summarized by the phrase “fixing stuff doesn’t come easy to me.”

Despite this simple reality, I am very enthusiastic about trying things that inevitably should be left to those who actually know the name and purpose of all the tools and gizmos that are required to fix, repair or assemble something.

I never, however,  let terminology stand in my way and it was with this cavalier, optimistic attitude that I decided last week to install a dimmer switch in the library.

Installing a dimmer switch is easy. I know this because I looked it up on line before I got started and it said that it was easy, right at the beginning of page one on the web site. I should have read page two of the instructions. Apparently there is more than one meaning for the term easy.

I trundled my bones down to the local hardware store which is as mysterious a place to me as a Masonic Temple and bought a dimmer switch. I made my selection based on colour because I am a fairly visual person. As it turns out, I should have made my decision on whether or not I needed a single or double-pole switch.

I was to learn the definition of those terms later…….much later in the process. They were buried on page two as it turns out and would subsequently discover when I got around to reading it.

I didn’t tell Maggie I was going to install the switch. I like to surprise her like I did one time after she went to work and I rearranged all the furniture in the living room or the time I decided to paint the bedroom a deep Chianti red while she was on a trip to Cairo. I think it makes her life more fun or at the very least more secure if she doesn’t know what I’m up to until after I’ve done it.

When I brought the new dimmer switch home, I remembered to turn off the power before removing the old light switch. This has not always been my policy when doing electrical stuff but after getting a rather significant electrical jolt and watching a screwdriver fly through the air and embed itself in the opposite wall a few years ago, I tend to be somewhat rigid in adhering to that practice now.

I took off the switch plate, pulled the old switch out of the wall and unscrewed the wires. I then prepared to install the new switch.

Problem number one: the wall had a red and three black wires; the switch had two black and a green wire. I realized that I probably should have observed which wire had been connected to which wire on the old switch.

I went back out to the garage, threw the circuit breaker to on and went upstairs to my office, rebooted my computer and the modem to look up wiring diagrams. Problem solved and back down I went, turned off the power and went to the library and connected the wires as shown on line, pushed the dimmer switch back into the wall, replaced the cover plate and went out to the garage and turned on the power.

I went back to the library and turned on the dimmer switch. There was no power. I don’t mean that there was no power to the light to which the switch was connected; I mean there was no power in the library at all. None of the lights worked, the phone had no power nor did any of the wall sockets.

Damn.

Just to add spice to the moment, I became aware that there was no power in the front foyer either. The ceiling fan in the clerestory ceiling had stopped turning, the overhead light didn’t turn on and neither would the outside lights at the front door.

Oops.

Because there was power in the rest of the house, I was pretty confident I had merely popped a circuit breaker so back out to the garage I went but all the breakers were unbroken.

I don’t handle complexity well and this was starting to get complicated.

I turned off the power, went back to the library, removed the wall plate and pulled out the dimmer switch. I wired the switch to a different r black wire, pushed the switch back into the wall, replaced the plate and went back to the garage to turn on the power and after checking to see if it worked, tried connecting the switch to the third black wire and turned the power on yet again.

I wasn’t quite as optimistic when I went back to the library because I had this sinking sensation growing in my stomach that this was going to be like assembling the barbeque had been but the library had power. The light in the library was on and the switch dimmed it. Unfortunately, the library now had too much power. The new dimmer switch now controlled and dimmed all of the lights and sockets in the library and as a new added bonus it also controlled the ceiling fan, outdoor lights and ceiling light at the main entrance foyer as well.

I felt like the switch was battling me for control of the house electrical system and I was caught up in an expanding power struggle.

It wasn’t quite what I had intended but I had somehow managed to connect a dimmer switch that now controlled lights and power sockets in two different parts of the house simultaneously. I decided it was time for a drink and a cigarette so that I could weigh the possible advantages of leaving things as they were; starting with answering the question, "Will Maggie notice?"

There weren’t any advantages that I could see and I was pretty sure Maggie would notice. She's pretty sharp and quite observant when I've screwed something up. (To be honest, after Cairo, I think she looks for things when she gets home from work) So after my cigarette, I went back to the garage, turned off the power and decided to take a look at the light switches in the front hall to see if I could rectify the situation. at least in the hallway.

Bad decision.

The hall had all of its switches connected to each other in series which necessitated returning to the garage, turning the power back on, going up stairs, rebooting the computer and modem and looking up switches wired in series. That information is readily available on line; it is also as mystical as trying to understand the Kabala.

While it hasn’t served me all that well in my life, I resolved to fall back on trial and error as the only recourse open to me.

Another bad decision but apparently when it comes to this kind of stuff, I am a creature of habit.

For the next five hours, I went back and forth from the front hall to the garage to turn the power on and off more often than a five year old asks ‘why’ after you’ve answered their original question. I tried all kinds of different wiring configurations and alternately had the ceiling fan and the outdoor lights working but not the overhead light, the overhead light working but not the ceiling fan and the outdoor lights or nothing working or everything working but all still connected to the library’s dimmer switch.

Even more troubling was the fact that no matter which configuration I tried, I always had two or three wires with nothing to which to connect. I was pretty confident that wasn't helping the situation.

I finally decided to put everything back the way it was and simply remove the dimmer switch in the library and install the original light switch which was almost a good decision. What would have made it a very good decision is if everything had gone back to the way it was before I tried to install the dimmer switch.

It didn't.

For reasons I still don’t understand, the library switch is still now controlling power in both the library and the front hall which means we have to leave it in the on position at all times.

We can’t dim the lights in the library and now have to turn them on manually rather than using the switch and while the outdoor lights and overhead light in the front hall are working again, the ceiling fan isn't.

Fortunately, we tend to only use the fan in the summer so it is my hope that I will be able to get an electrician in to fix things over the winter before Maggie notices next spring.

She thinks I’m really handy after I assembled the new barbeque over a two-day period and I don’t see the point in spoiling her illusions. I'm thoughtful like that.


RELATED POSTS

Barbeques and Dirty Words
http://bearsrant.blogspot.ca/2012/07/barbeques-and-dirty-words.html

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It's About Time

My grandson turns three this month and while he understands that birthdays mean birthday parties and birthday parties mean birthday presents, he has no concept of what it means to have lived for three years. Even though he has been fascinated by clocks since he was barely a year old, time is irrelevant to him. It simply doesn’t exist.

It’s like that for all of us. Time is a relative concept in our lives and its value changes as we move through the years of our lives.

When we are very young, just as it is with my grandson, we have no awareness of time. When we grow a little older, it moves too slowly. We can’t wait to be 8 or 10 when we will be allowed to stay up an extra half hour or perhaps ride our bike all the way to the mall and back. We tend to wish time away in our hurry to get to be older because the age we are is not the age we want to be and time is limitless. Time has no end for us then.

By the time we have become teens, we have become immortal. Time is once again irrelevant but it is not because we are unaware of it but simply because we feel like we will live forever. Sixty or seventy years seems like infinity so there isn’t much reason to worry about time. Puberty becomes far more intrusive in our lives than time and we give ourselves over to it.

In our later teens, time has value only in so much as we never have enough time. We’re in a rush all the time. We have friends to meet, hair to do and make up to put on before the big date. We have to have yet another bloody assignment handed in by tomorrow morning and we haven’t even started the assigned reading. Nothing clarifies the value of time like having a final exam in the morning and the knowledge that you haven’t even begun to study the night before.

Time moves more slowly when we get out into the workforce and start building a life of our own.

We’re busy and time is important in and only because it managing time is how we organize our lives. We schedule appointments, have deadlines for projects and may be late for work because we missed the bus. In terms of our lives, however, time stands still until one day suddenly; we’re celebrating our fortieth birthday.

Where the hell did that come from?

Forty is a benchmark along time’s road. We all experience and we pretty much all react to it in similar way, more or less. Like turning twenty-one it’s a big deal but the difference is that when you turn twenty-one, it is with a sense of liberation and time stretches before you like the ocean. When you turn forty, you become aware that at best, half of the time you have been allotted may be gone.

Beyond the party with the sarcastic cards and the joke gifts, turning forty is a time of reflection for most of us. It is when we become aware of what we have accomplished so far and how much we have yet to get done. For some it is a non-event but for most it is mildly traumatic or at least the reawakening of our awareness that we are not immortal and that while time may be infinite, our time is not.

By the time we turn sixty we have mixed emotions about time. On the one hand we are becoming increasingly aware that we are staring our own mortality in the face but on the other, we are fairly happy not to have shaken hands with it yet. At sixty, the end of time becomes a real, if faint shadow on our lives.

Some try to reverse time with plastic surgery, diets, vitamins, exercise and various other practices but we know in our hearts that time is moving forward and it will continue with or without us. Some fear the end of their time. Death frightens them, others never give it much thought but we are all aware that the end is coming. It may be soon, it may not be for awhile but unlike when we were fifteen, we are aware that it is coming.

We are constantly reminded as people we knew start to die. When we were teenagers, it was a rare event for one of our friends to die and usually it was the result of an accident or some other tragedy. Now our friends are dying from illness and old age and we seem to go to more funerals than weddings.

I personally have always felt that whatever age I was at the moment was the perfect age to be. I feel that to this day even though my arthritis is painful at times and I’ve lost too many friends and family to their end of time. I wouldn’t trade this age to be young again for anything because time not only takes life, it gives it.

With age comes knowledge from experience. There is richness in a life that has lived for many years and their satisfaction in seeing your children grow up and take on successful lives. It brings grandchildren and less emotional turmoil than we experienced when we were young.

Scientists have complex theories about the true nature of time but for you and me, it is simply linear. It travels in a straight line and it travels in only one direction.

Time is infinite. Life is not and we look at time differently throughout our lives but in the end, however much time we were given, our time is measured by the life we lived. It isn’t death that should be our great fear, death is natural. The great fear should be reaching the end and realizing we squandered the time we were given and have little to show for our time on this earth.

What a sad waste of time that would be.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others