Alt text:
Any electrician will warn you to first locate and flip the house's CAUSALITY circuit breaker before touching the CIRCUIT BREAKERS one.
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
591 points (98.8% liked)
xkcd
8836 readers
251 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
These labels are waaaaaay too legible for any panel I've seen.
"Room 1, Room 2, Zone, Range/Kitchen, Bath, ECT, Hi-Lo"
In my house I have bathroom one, bathroom two, fan, kitchen, outlets, living room, L outlets, stove, kitchen outlets two, hall, upstairs, bedroom 1, bedroom two 2, bedroom one outlets, bedroom 2 outlets, outside.
I only have one bathroom, and I don't have a fan in any room so God knows what that controls.
I also have some wiring in the attic space with a big sign on the power box that says "WARNING wiring uses incorrect colours" and they're all brown.
I'm betting your house used to have a 2nd bath or was going to get one but was abandoned. The fan was likely the bathroom 2 or possibly a range hood.
All brown wires is definitely what's incorrect. Hot, neutral and ground should be easily identified at a glance (black or red for hot, white for neutral, green or bare copper for ground where I am). I've only ever seen brown sheathing on older fabric or paper insulated wiring.
I am not an electrician and this isn't advice.
Where I am brown is live. So they're all live wires apparently.
The house was built in the early 1920s so I'm not surprised that it's weird. It was built before homes really had electricity or indoor plumbing so the wiring and bathroom were added after the fact. Combined with the fact that the previous owner did a lot of DIY and weren't very good at it.
We had one labeled "tv"
When we took ownership, there was no TV in the house, but not even a wall mount or evidence an old mount.