I stood in the dark of my garage, balancing on two leftover pieces of banister. My father-in-law stood on a large piece of wood painted white that doubled as a work bench. I was holding a flashlight in one hand and long 2x4 in the other while he worked in the fuse box. I could smell my son's dirty diapers from across the garage and mosquitos picked mercilessly at my feet and ankles.
Earlier in the day when my step-father and I were installing the washer and dryer sparks had flown out of the plug and there was a small chunk of the ground prong missing on the dryer. I'd jumped back when the plug had sizzled and popped and my step-dad stiffened. When we looked at the circuit breaker in the garage it wasn't tripped, so I tripped it by hand and we heard it pop in the box when I tried to reset it.
"I'd prefer not to deal with this. Can your father-in-law come by tonight and help you with this?"
"I'll find out."
By 8pm he was there with his kids and we were climbing on top of the washer and dryer in the closet and pulling apart the 220 plug. Looking inside we noticed that the shielding around the ground was broken and when I'd plugged in the dryer I had touched the hot wire and the ground at the same time and that's what caused the issue. I wondered how long the shielding had been broken and the previous owner had this ticking time bomb of an electrical hazard in their house. This was the second one we've found. In just the laundry room. In just a few weeks. I started to worry about the rest of the house.
My father-in-law and I replace the plug and flipped the switch. The breaker wouldn't reset.
"Well Mo, our next option is to go to Home Depot and get a circuit breaker, because that's my next guess about where the problem is."
We got our supplies and returned,and prepared for the replacement. I shifted from foot to foot and recalled the pages from the Boy Scout Handbook about what to do in case someone came in contact with a live electrical wire. I wondered if I shouldn't have bought a rubber mat for my father-in-law to stand on. I wondered what would happen if he slipped and touched the hot bar inside the box. Would I smell his hair catching fire? Would he catch fire? Would I react quickly enough with the 2x4 to push him free and save his life?
He cut the power to the house and removed the front panel to the box. We poked at the breakers in the box with my multi-meter, checking to make sure that each breaker was dead before we got our hands in there. I wouldn't have been surprised if flipping the main switch hadn't turned off the power. All of the weirdness in the house so far has shown me that home repairs is only half the physical visible labor. The other half is archaeology, as I try to piece together who the previous owners were by the work they did and the choices they made.
We got the old 2 pull 220 breaker out in the dark and wrestled the new one into place. The mosquitos danced around our legs, and moths divebombed through the beam of the flashlight. Heather stood 20 feet behind us squinting in the dark. I pushed the wires into the breaker and screwed them into place. I tried to push the wires into the breaker without actually having to touch them. My father-in-law kept reminding me that I had to grab them firmly. I could hear my wife shuffling from foot to foot.
Finally we had everything in place and restored power to the house. The fuse box buzzed and vibrated for a minute. I thought it might lift into the sky or jump out of the wall and dance around the garage floor but it stopped making noise and we waited, one heartbeat, two heartbeats, three heartbeats. Everything seemed normal and good.
We tested with the multi-meter at the box, and then again at the plug upstairs in the laundry room. We plugged in the dryer and turned it on. Everything seems great now, but I'm still worried.
Given the two bad power experiences I've had in the laundry room alone I keep imagining what other disasters await us.
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