Gardner Bender Receptacle Tester and Circuit Analyzer GRT-3500
Buying your first house can be an educational experience. By the time you get to the fifth or sixth purchase, you notice patterns – and one such pattern seems to be how many do-it-yourselfers are confused about the simple task of wiring an electrical outlet. I’m happy to say that not a single outlet in the house we just sold was wired with reverse polarity. Not so with the new house, which features a finished basement where work was done by “an engineer.” I suspect an engineer of the software variety, since an electrical engineer is pretty unlikely to install the light switches upside down. Ya think?
Oh, well, at least he didn’t use lamp cord instead of 12-gauge Romex® to control ceiling fans on 20-amp circuits – been there, seen that, about three houses ago…
Sperry CS550A Circuit Breaker Finder
Remember the last time you did any electrical work at your place? Maybe it was installing a ceiling fan, putting up a security light, or replacing a toggle switch with a dimmer; but it’s a safe bet the first instruction went something like:
"Shut off power to the circuit."
Oh, sure. Easy for the writer to say: he probably has every circuit in the breaker box labeled. If you’re like the rest of us, your breaker box is labeled (if at all) with little notes like "Sara's rm," "mst bth" or "dk lts." It’s more likely that the breaker box has no labels at all. So how to turn off the circuit without resetting all the clocks in the house? Plug in a boombox and crank Katy Perry up to eleven? Do you use a helper and a cell phone, asking each time you click off a breaker, "still on?" Been there, done that - and found out the correct breaker is always at the opposite end of the board from where you start.
