Home Ownership

I made a copy of the ‘sticker’ for my electrical box and keep it updated and taped to an adjacent wall. The sticker is nearly illegible (it’s probably around 45 years old) and this way it’s nice and readable. Did a little mockup in a spreadsheet of the box.

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I bought this super cool tool thingy that you clip to a set of wires or plug into an outlet and then take the other half down to the panel and it’ll let you know when you touch the right breaker. Pretty cool. Should be here tomorrow. :grin:

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That is a nice tool to have, especially if you need to ID breakers and their circuits.

I’ve wanted one for a long time, but never saw the need vs cost.

The network cabling version we have at the office is called “The Fox and the Hound.”
Sometimes it’s a little TOO sensitive - like a four-inch diameter bundle shares the same single signal.

The tool and accessories was only $50. And it works great. My breaker box is labeled very poorly so even if I only use it for one round of labeling it’ll be worth the time I’ll save going up and down trying to figure it out by hand. If it cost much more though I’d have had a harder time justifying it.

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Oh. Well. Let me introduce you to my basement filled with justifications.

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Yeah, “Fox and Hound” seems to be a pretty common name for a toner, which is what the low voltage version is usually sold under.

We make do for regular power with the plug-in outlet testers and the ‘pen’ style voltage detectors.

At home I either have a Lovely Assistant or I use a portable radio turned up loudly.

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I have a set of FRS radios that I’ll use with a helper.

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I think we’re testing different things here. You seem to be doing breaker checks to make sure 5e breaker is shut off: the pens are for after that to make sure you really did get the right one. Unless you mean you have The Lovely Assistant touch the live wires first just in case.

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The Lovely Assistant (or me, roles are reversible in our case) walks around with the lamp, or radio, or plug-in tester while I flip breakers off and on again until we see what goes where.

Them newfangled purty testers jest make it faster and easier.
:wink:

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Also the lovely assistants here are sullen teenagers, so I can usually get one or two tries out of them and then they drift off to do something else and I’m stuck in the basement yelling “this one? Hey, guys, this one???”

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Mine was a pre-teen who really wanted to help, but he has the attention span of a squirrel on meth so same effect.

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Saturday: receive Lowe’s gift card

Sunday: Garbage disposer in kitchen sink appears to be broken (spins manually, but motor just hums when power is applied). Start shopping Lowes.com for new unit.

If you give Hammy from Over the Hedge enough energy drinks, he can slow down time.

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Finally some progress. Just need trim and baseboards. Etc.

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And a couple of doggos lazing on the chairs :rofl:

$500 to get the drains snaked and an enormous pile of hideous crap pulled.

  1. I need to have a conversation with the Dragonlady about not putting hair in the toilet.
  2. The fancy toilet we bought 10 years ago doesn’t flush properly and needs to be replaced. Note: it always flushed kind of lazily and mostly required 2 or 3 flushes to operate. It took a long time to get, it was dropped in the driveway and broke into shards, and a second one took 6 months, then another 2 months to get installed. She won’t be happy about this, but we tested it. We poured buckets of water into it and it flushed perfectly. Try to flush it, and nothing. Sluggish. Barely able to glurg. I can go at the tiny outlet holes with a bottle brush to see if I can clean out any dried water residue that might be obstructing the flow from the reservoir first, but I don’t have much hope. So, that’ll be another $300 for a decent, tall toilet. I may take a trip to the recycler to see if they have something.

I’ll trade you - just under $13,000 to replace the mansard part of the roof (the slopey part). We still have to get the top, flat part done but that can wait for a year or two until hopefully prices come down a bit. The mansard couldn’t wait.

I’ve got a little bit more flooring to do and then I’m going to schedule a duct cleaning. I cannot stand how crappy the airflow is here. There has to be a problem. No way this is how it was meant to be.