A Funny Electrical Fiasco

Recently, I replaced the main light in our kitchen. It was surprisingly easy. Black wire to black wire, white wire to white wire, and ground to ground. Bingo. It was done. Because of this I got extra cocky and decided to put a new light in above our kitchen sink. Boy, did I make a mistake thinking I could do that!

If you’re not sure what I mean with the wires, here is a diagram that is kind of close to what I was looking at:

My light didn’t have a fan, so imagine this without that fan wire and you will understand. The orange and yellow caps holding the wires together are wire nuts – for future reference. So let’s proceed from the point where I turn off the power at the breaker box to begin this project.

To aid you in my story, I have created a visual of the kitchen area where the fiasco happened.

I thought the main power would be in the ceiling, where the mount is. Instead, a wire came down from the mount through a chain and went into a plate on the wall. There is a plastic wire cover coming from the cupboard that also went to the plate on the wall.

Now, above my stove and connected to the bottom of the cupboard is one of those light/fan hoods. The lights help you see the stove and the fan helps suck up any smoke from what your are cooking. That died a while back and I wanted to take it down. I disconnected the hood from the wires that went from the vent/light to the plate on the wall (hidden by the plastic wire cover). So now I have two wires that I don’t need that are connected to the main power wire, which is under the plate.

I now have to remove cover from the plate to expose the wires underneath. What I see is this huge asbestos wire coming out of a huge hole in the drywall. The wires kinda look like this:

Now that picture is a lot neater than my wire. The first thing my father-in-law, who I have now called for assistance, does is disconnect all of the wires by removing the wire nuts. Of course, we didn’t really pay attention to them when we did it.

Once the wires are disconnected, we get rid of the two that were connected to the vent/light. So from here on out, it should be easy, right? Black to black, white to white, etc…WRONG!

We wire it up and my father-in law tells me to go downstairs and turn on the breaker. When I flip it the bulb in the light goes on. Good? No. The light switch is in the off position. When he flips it on, the breaker snaps off. So we figure we got the two wires from the switch messed up and swap them to the other wires. We turn the power back on again and the breaker snaps again.

My father-in-law didn’t have his voltage tester, so we made a quick trip to the hardware store. I pick up a cheap one and we come home. My father-in-law tells me that the black wire should be hot and the white should be neutral. When we test the wires, it is the opposite! He is perplexed and so am I. That is NOT the way it is supposed to be.

After consulting my brother-in-law, they agree that somewhere in the walls of our house, whoever wired the house, swapped the wires. Maybe at a hotbox or somewhere else. There is more discussion and it is decided that if we take the “hot”(black) wire from the lamp and put it on the white wire coming from the wall (which is now the “hot”) and the neutral (white) wire to the black wire (now neutral) coming from the wall – it should work. So we do that and add the two wires from the switch and TA DA! We have light and the breaker doesn’t snap off.

I tell you all of that to tell you this….

All in all, I must have run up and down the stairs 30 times during this project. Once we got the the vent off the cupboard, I pushed the stove back in place and plugged it in to the 220 plug behind it.

After flipping the breaker off one time, I came back upstairs to see my father-in-law on the counter with the main power wire in his hands. I noticed the clock for the stove was on, so I yell, “WAIT A MINUTE, DAD!!” He almost falls off the ladder as he asks what was the matter. I told him, “The stove light is on and it has power!” I said this totally forgetting that the 220 plug is an entirely separate line. My father-in-law reminded me of this.

“You scared the hell out me, Dad!” I told him.

“I had my hands on the wire. You scared the hell out of me!” he replied.

My three year old son, Andrew was watching all of this and said, “You both scared the hells out of my body, too!”

That was the best moment of the project! A laugh we both needed!