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Monday, Dec. 16, 2002 - 6:58 p.m. Yeah, I figured out the problem with our security light. It wasn�t anything I did yesterday while changing the fixture. It was caused by just another one of the many �home repairs� that the previous owner had done to this house. I don�t like playing with electricity, so I haven�t done much to upgrade the wiring around here. Sometime before we moved into the house, the old owner (lets call him D.A.D., which is short for Drunk Former Athletic Director, since that was his job at a local high school until he retired this fall) paid a local electrician to rewire much of the inside of the house, and he had a circuit breaker box installed at the same time. Right after we moved in, I spent a day (with the power shut off) replacing all of the old outlets and wall switches, bringing the house out of the 1930�s (when most of the old outlets were installed. Some even had cracked plastic, or whatever they made them out of back then). But that was the extent of my electrical work. All except for the damn motion detector light I installed on our detached garage. When we moved in, there was a old goose-necked metal light on the garage. I held one flood light bulb and lit up the area around our back patio pretty nicely. There was one problem, though: the light wasn�t attached to a switch. It was either on all of the time, or you had to get on a stepladder to unscrew the bulb to shut it off. This is a fine example of D.F.A.D.�s home improvement work. He just left the thing on, 24/7. When I found this out, I started the string of installing and replacing cheep motion detector lights. I had one last for almost 3 years before it gave out. Since that time, I haven�t had one work properly for longer than a year. Like I said yesterday, it was time to change to something better. Since the light didn�t come on once it became dark yesterday (it is a dusk to dawn� light, with a photoelectric eye to trigger the light on and off), I had to wait until today (after work) to trace the problem. The first thing I did was remove the cover to access the wiring. All of my connections were good. I then took the wire nuts off of the connections, and attached a new wall outlet to the wires coming from inside of the garage. I plugged a string of Christmas lights into the outlet, and then turned the circuit breaker back on (yeah, I know- not very professional. I just wanted to see if I had a live connection coming from the garage, and this was the quickest method I could come up with, since I don�t have any electrical testing equipment.). No lights. That was actually good news, because I now knew that the light fixture was not the problem. The next step was to climb my stepladder into the loft area of the garage. Once I was up there, I checked the wiring from the light fixture back to the junction box. This is where I found out what the problem was. I noticed that the wire heading up to the loft was relatively new , with a plastic casing around the wire strands. Since most of the old wiring in the house and garage are the old Romex (metal-encased) wiring, this meant that the wire coming out of the garage should have been new, too. The wire outside of the outlet was the old, heavily insulated stiff wiring that was put in the house when it was built. How could this be, you ask? Because somewhere in the past, the old Romex wiring must have gone bad. When D.F.A.D. decided to fix this, he just went to the junction box on the ground floor in the garage, cut the old wiring loose (but, of course he didn�t remove it. It still hangs on the wall, waiting for me to rip it down whenever I have some free time in the future) and ran a new line up into the garage�s loft. Now, if the average homeowner was faced with this repair, they would have cut the old wiring loose from the outside light fixture, removed it from the loft, and then run the new line outside, attaching it to the existing light fixture. That was too much work for D.F.A.D. No, instead he cut the old wire off inside the garage, twisted the new wire ends onto the old wire ends, and wrapped the mess with electrician�s tape. Then, he stapled the new wire to a wood beam, and left this booby-trap for someone else to find, many years later. I removed the staples, feed the new line through the outside opening, and then attached the outlet to the wire ends. Went inside, flipped the circuit breaker back on, and� There was light! It was just the string of Christmas lights, but light none the less. After shutting circuit off once again, I removed the outlet, attached the newer wire ends to the light fixture (using wire nuts, not just slapping a wad of tape on them like D.F.A.D. would have), and sealed everything up. I turned the circuit breaker on one more time, crossed my fingers, and climbed the steps to see what I had done. Light! Bright, sodium-vapor created light washing over my driveway, making the backyard more secure, and probably keeping the Drug Dealer Neighbor up at night. That might be a problem. This light is bright! Much of its glow is bouncing off of the bricks of D.D.N.�s house. I think his bedrooms are all upstairs, so he might not mind. If it bothers him too much, I can always put some sort of shield over the light that faces his walls. I don�t imagine he will complain, thought. As many times as his �associates� have tried to break into his house in the past year, I think he might actually approve of the added illumination�.
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