The Place: Case de Proto, Gage's Room
The Job: Another Ceiling Fan
Estimated Time of Completion: 1 hour... I almost can't write that with a straight face.
Thanks to the piss-poor duct work of the good Doctor, the back two rooms of the house are warmer than the rest of the house. Gage's room is sweltering. I promised him I would install his ceiling fan by Sunday. So, Sunday, I mopped the kitchen floor(one of my alarmingly small TWO goals of the day), and got to the project.
The first thing I noticed when I opened the box was that this was a small ceiling fan. And then it happened. I actually thought to myself: "this is gonna be a cinch." For those of you who follow Proto, you know this doomed the entire job.
The fan itself was already wired for the light, so all I had to do was mount and wire it to the house. That's all I had to do. Firstly, and without hesitation, I went to the breaker box from hell to attempt to cut the power. The switch marked "Back Bedroom" turned off the power to the living room, so I just started making my way along the switches until the light in his room went off. Finally, the breaker switch labeled "Utility Closet" did the trick. I really need to re-label those things. So, I unhooked the light in Gage's room and quickly noticed a few things.
1) There were a hell of a lot of wires up in there, up in there. Two heavy blacks leading to the hot wire, a black and a white leading to the neutral and then two more heavy blacks linked together leading to the Dead Zone for all I knew. Oh, yeah, and a ground wire attached to the bracket. We will go back to that shortly.
2) Thanks to my handy-dandy voltmeter I was assured that there was no power flowing through those wires. I even did the use-a-wooden-sword-to-touch-the-hot-and-neutral-wires-as-I-cringe method of testing... just to be sure.
3) The wiring box is loose as a bum knee.
4) The screws on the mounting bracket look suspiciously stripped and of some alien head type I was not familiar with.
I tried to mount the fan mounting bracket to the wiring box mounting bracket, but nothing was working. I had to find a way to get the WBMB off with the stripped, alien screws. I was able to wedge a flat head into one of the screws and get it out. the other was not budging. I went and sat in the living room for a few minutes and thought about it. After those few minutes I simply ganked the hell out of the WBMB and it popped out. I figured in the back of my mind that I had done some sort of damage to the screw hole, but that was alright, I had a plan.
The FMB came with two types of mounting screws, longs and shorts. For the first hole, the short screw worked well. In the ganked hole, the short screw was, understandably, too small. but, here was my plan: I would use the bigger screw, see, and just overwhelm the ganked screw hole.
The ganked screw hole wanted no part of this. I went back into the living room to think and look at the old bracket with the ground wire attached to it. The wiring box had no ground wire coming off'n it. The ground was just accomplished by attaching the ground wire to the fixture and the bracket which was attached to the wiring box. Now, the FMB came with a ground wire, so I came up with a plan. I would use the ground wire from the old bracket to connect the FMB to the ganked hole. It was pretty heavy duty wire, so why not?
I attached the ground wire from the FMB to the pleasant screw, then jimmy rigged the FMB to the ganked screw hole with the old grounding wire. PERFECT! Except for the fact that, because the wiring box was so loose, the bracket wobbled back and forth. Bracket wobbles, ceiling fan wobbles. Balls.
Went out to the Proto garage and got a drill bit and two long screws. Long story short, I anchored the mounting bracket into the ceiling itself. Then I attached the fan and turned the power back on and flipped the switch... nothing.
I pawed like a cat at the ceiling fan, just in case my grounding was off. No thrumming, no shock. I pulled the chain on the fan... voila!
Then aside from cross threading one of the nuts that attached the fan to the FMB and then getting it all put back together and finding washers for those uncross-threaded mounting nuts, it was a cinch.
I swear it is an adventure anytime you have to do anything plumbing or electrical in this house.The original owner, Victor, was really good at using whatever he had lying around to make things seem like they work fine. Twenty years later, I get a nice surprise each and every time I try a DIY project at the Casa de Proto.
Only one, possibly two ceiling fans to go!
Time to completion: Three hours.
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