Am electrician, can confirm.
To be fair, I don’t get called out to fix good work. If something’s fucked, it’s usually because some “handyman” who “totally knows what he’s doing” was there before.
Between that, and the fact that most of the people involved in wiring up houses are just laborers under an electrician’s supervision (ostensibly), yeah, I get plenty to complain about.
It also makes it easier, I feel, for customers to stomach the bill if I can adequately explain how much better off they are now that I’ve done my job.
Can I ask a question: do repair electricians often cross paths with install electricians? I don’t know much about the business of the trade, but my feeling was that the folks doing installs in new houses / buildings rarely crossed paths with the ones going around repairing everything. In my mind these are like two separate worlds.
Kinda depends? But yeah they’re mostly separate.
When I worked for a shop (self-employed now), they had us divided into Construction and Service, and the two pretty much kept to themselves. Service guys looked down on Construction guys because they didn’t know much about troubleshooting; Construction guys looked down on Service guys because most of them couldn’t build their way out of a wet paper bag.
Most of my experience as an apprentice was construction. I did some service calls now and then when jobsites slowed down in the winter. Now I mostly do service calls, and, frankly, it’s a HELL of a lot easier.
Okay! That matches with my impression! I have a friend who works in construction (drywall taper) and the guy works insanely hard, always comes home from work covered head to toe in mud or dust, and is pretty much always sore. Great guy, very friendly beer drinking buddy! But that’s a kind of work I could never do, at least working for someone else.
The troubleshooting nature of repair/service electrical seems vastly more appealing to me, though I imagine with enough experience 90% of the faults become routine!
Yeah I don’t envy drywallers. That is exhausting work, especially since a lot of them get paid by the sheet. There’s a running joke in construction about them constantly leaving soda bottles full of piss because they can’t take the time to go to the john.
Electrical construction (I mostly did commercial fwiw, but dabbled in residential and industrial as well) can be pretty rough too. Other than the brief time I worked with the union, you’re pretty much expected to bust ass all day every day, forever. It was… not fun, most of the time.
But you’re right on the last point too - once you really understand the system, most faults can be tracked down and figured out pretty quickly. After all, electricity is basically binary - either the circuit works, or it doesn’t, in which case you just keep following it back to the part where it does work, and now you can find the problem.
It’s not always that simple, like if multiple circuits are sharing a neutral, or you’ve just got a loose neutral connection… but as you may guess, if you’ve got power where you’re supposed to but the thing still won’t work, the problem is the neutral. So… it’s still kinda simple lol. There’s only so many parts to a circuit after all.
And then of course you have those rare issues where the fault is actually dangerous! Just a few years ago I called an electrician to my house because the breaker for the laundry room light fixtures was tripping every time, so I suspected a short. The electrician who showed up (hell of a guy, loved to chat!) said the ceiling light fixture was wired incorrectly and the housing was live! A quick and easy fix for him but anyone changing a lightbulb on that socket over the past 30 years was risking a shock!
Of course this is only 120V AC so not the deadliest thing in the world, but it’s always fascinated me that a fault can go unnoticed for many many years and still pose a hazard. It’s kind of like WW2 munitions or something, but completely unintentional!
If a live wire was touching the chassis and tripping the breaker likely because the chassis was grounded that would mean it’s wired correctly though. Unless like a neutral broke off and touched the live chassis causing the overload?
He said live and neutral were reversed. The ground connection to the chassis was correct though!
Sounds like the elevator trade, too
Repair electricians definitely run into the work of install electricians, but my experience is they’re mostly two different groups. Install electricians may come back to do repairs on their own work, or if there’s a lull in new construction jobs they can pick up they might fill in the hours with some smaller repair jobs.
There are some some more specialized electricians that do a mix of both, for example my company is mostly generator focused. We’re involved in both new construction and repairs for things that are generator/transfer switch/solar related.
That’s really cool! When you do repair work for a generator I assume you’re not just going to replace the generator, so I guess you have to get in there and do component level repairs? That seems really cool. I would imagine some of the technicians would have the skills of both a mechanic and an electrician for some of those jobs?
Right, I’m fully licensed as an electrician but I also have to repair/maintain natural gas/propane/diesel engines. There’s also increasing amounts of computer/network knowledge needed for new controllers and setting up network monitoring. Overall it’s a job that really benefits from a lot of different skill sets, and has a lot of day to day variety in the work I’m doing.
Yeah, there’s a lot of questionable work out there. Many homeowners underestimate the difficulty involved in some repairs too, so there’s definitely a need to justify why it took as long as it did.
Even if it doesn’t take long, it’s helpful for some if they get an explanation that shows your expertise. Which is lots of what they’re paying for usually.
On my jobsite, working in new construction, we still complain a lot about what the people before us did. Everybody on the crew is a competent electrician, yet we still have plenty of times where we look at the most experienced electrician there and think “wth was he thinking??”
I feel love the ironic part is that both good and bad electricians can have the same outcome. Some wacky installation that works. The difference is that the bad guy probably doesn’t know why it works and/or the pros/cons. The great electrician realizes that while it’s probably not the “correct” way, it saves a ton of cost and work and is sufficient for what is being requested.
Well thats the thing, you don’t know about all the “good enough” things, you know when they fuck something up and it doesn’t work. Then curse their name as you have to redo it…
My previous house was a new build. I had some weird electrical problems. I called the builder and they sent someone out.
The guy looked at my panel and said, “Oh yeah, I remember this house. We had to fire the electrician who wired your house because he was always showing up high.”
I had a new storm door installed through Lowe’s and the contractor they contracted to do it showed up real nice, we talked, then he went off and smoked meth and did the best fucking job I’ve ever seen.
50/50 I guess.
There’s high and then there’s high on meth.
I had a gas stove installed by Lowe’s. The guys that installed it couldn’t figure out how to get the gas to stop leaking, but wouldn’t admit they had no idea what they were doing. They told me I would have to turn the gas valve off at the connection when I wasn’t using the stove
I stopped trying to explain and let them leave, because I was over it. Installed the connection myself, I was just happy I didn’t have to move it or the old one
I did call Lowe’s and let them know about it though, so that those guys wouldn’t inadvertently kill someone with their installations
50/50 for sure lol
Just install a barbeque lighter near the leak and set a timer to regularly light it and just flare off anything that has leaked since the previous flare. Then, when rebuilding after the fire, add a pressure sensor to the new setup that reduces the interval if the pressure increases beyond what it was when the interval was first calibrated.
Then, when rebuilding after the fire
Caught me off guard, lmao.
Yeah that seems like a minor problem lol
In the old days of town gas this would actually kill everybody since that stuff was just hydrogen mixed with carbon monoxide.
Primus sucks
I think they’re pretty good actually!
Listen if all you’re doing is storm door build outs you get pretty good at it even when you’re smoking meth.
Actually I’m misremembering, he did the front door as well as the storm door.
Installed new trim and repaired some exterior wood rot he found and fixed the trim above the door so it would stop leaking lmao.
All those things were supposed to be extra charge but he just did them and that was that.
Listen if all you’re doing is storm door build outs you get pretty good at it
evenespecially when you’re smoking meth.
I bought a fridge from Lowe’s and one of the delivery guys asked to use my bathroom. When I went in there later, he had basically managed to pee on the floor instead of in the toilet. I’m a bit of a “tinkler sprinkler” myself but this was next level.
I feel like they shouldn’t charge (heh) you for it
What’s fun is criticizing someone’s code and lack of proper comments/documentation, and then realizing you wrote it 3+ years ago.
My main project is in a private repo with me as the sole dev but I swear there is some dumbass pushing shitty code.
At first I get embarrassed when that happens. But then I take a little pride in knowing that means I’ve grown in knowledge in my field… Then I get mad at how past me was so dumb and now I have to fix HIS stuff! Screw that guy
Some days ago, I was complaining about some asinine decision on one of the systems I have to take care of with a programmer. The programmer then remembered that the thing I was complaining about was something that I asked to be added in the first place. He also reminded me of the why, but that knowledge simply made me wonder what the fucking fuck I was thinking back then.
The electrician equivalent is adding a 20A dedicated circuit along the wall and just snaking it all over the place through laziness (efficiency), and many moons later deciding to mount some tracks for a closet organizer but the voltage tester is freaking out like the wall is a game of Minesweeper
I work in municipal development. I was driving by and saw a hellscape development starting up and blocking traffic in the middle of Rush hour. So I pulled over, put on my City reflective vest, and went out to see who the hell authorized them for this bullshit.
They pulled out a permit with my signature on it.
I always tell every apprentice i work with that they need to make sure they weren’t the last guy to touch ut when they start bitching about the dumbass that came before them
I was doing some construction work this past weekend, and encountered some wiring that I did about 20 years ago. I spent the first 5 minutes complaining about the crazy asshole who wired it up, knowing full well that it was me. I am in this picture and I do not like it.
I feel like this is just a sign of good growth. I’d be AMAZED if any single person looks at work they did 20 years prior, and said “yep. That’s my best work.” Maybe arts, where there’s no objectivity, but anything you can actually quantify?
Middle-aged professional athletes, perhaps?
Fair. I think proper sports play is more akin to an art, but no doubt your physical prime is past you at a certain point.
I wouldn’t disagree with it being like art, but also, you can objectively measure quite a lot of sports, I think. In some sports/roles age isn’t as much of a disadvantage I think, but probably in quite a few sports it is.
Oh for sure. I don’t disagree in the slightest.
Speaking as a 57yo, I sure wish there was some sport where age wasn’t a disadvantage. Is getting your knees to make weird noises when you stand up a “sport”?
Well I mean, age is a disadvantage to most things except life wisdom, and there’s not really many sports centered on that. But if we make the definition “games”, then there is. Chess, for one? Until you start losing your memory in the old age, one would think experience just improves chess play. Hard to really call it a sport though. I think something like archery or shooting in general might not be too bad. You’re pretty stationary, it’s not about reaction times (unless you’re doing skeet or something) and it’s mostly about technique. Like that Turkish Olympic winner? He could’ve been 50, easily.
But what is always definitely a disadvantage is inexperience, I would say. Which is what youth basically is.
I did elder care facility maintenance work 20 years ago and am confident/hope all of my work has been rightfully undone and replaced by someone who gave more of a damn.
I still remember my sprinkler system wiring giving me a warm buzz every time I had to manually switch zones because my wiring was such ass.
God I hope they’ve fixed that.
That is part of my job description (SW Engineer)
The best part is, the previous person is usually yourself.
That guy is the worst fucking developer I’ve ever known.
Give em a break at least they are learning and getting better. They notice thier previous mistakes!
And mark them with a
TODO… Git blame is telling me it’s only 5 years old… Sure it would get resolved any day now…
Sometimes I’m blown away at how dumb my junior devs are, then I think about my first project out of college and I remember list<map<string,list<map<string,string>>>>
I have a couple of colleagues in the kitchen where I work who stand babbling, as if in a daze, if they see a mistake’s been made, sometiems for up to a minute. Very frustrating for me, as I prefer to just solve the problem. I remember one time holding my hand out to ask for the pan as my colleague stood with it, stirring it with a pair of tongs, repeatedly muttering that there weren’t enough peas in the linguine, and I was saying, fine, then give me the pan and I’ll chuck more peas in, but she just kept yammering away. Really fucks me off, haha.
The advantage of Chinese kitchen utensils, and layout is that I could just grab a ladel full of peas and dump them into the pan in such a situation. I had my own wok to deal with, but there’s a surprising amount of down time in cooking.
Turns out that if you were doing software development but using wires instead, it’s even more cumbersome, difficult and open to shitty solutions that other idiots before you tried out, and will also be fixed by idiots after you.
Because you know, solutions to problems are hard. And we all suck.
So instead… You look at the situation in disbelief, cursing, complaining, scoffing. Then you see a comment line and realise it’s your code from two years ago and you had the audacity to put your name to it like it might be a legacy worth preserving one day.
I worked on one project that was essentially one main app and then a plugin architecture where other companies could write modules that would be run inside the main app. My explicit instructions were to make it very difficult to actually write one of these modules (so that our competitors could not actually be competitive) and boy did I deliver! If my company had really wanted to deliver something like this that actually worked (in the sense of other companies being able to make real contributions) it would have been trivial to make everything HTML-based web apps.
I had to endure a roasting session where some junior developers laid into “grampa” for his absurdly bad design decisions. I suppose I deserved it, though, for my poor ethical choices.
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Like, I actually had emails from the bosses talking about this shit. I really should have saved them for blackmail - no worse ethically than what I did do.
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Bgaw!
As a software developer and sometimes home electrician, I am so glad that house wiring doesn’t support git blame, but it would be nice to know who not to hire because the work in my house when I purchased it was appalling
Nice. You would probably shake your head at me because I still haven’t fixed an issue w/ a receptical. Basically, the screw for the outlet box is completely stripped, so I couldn’t actually attach the faceplate. Nothing bad has happened yet, but there are a few exposed wires.
Maybe I should go get the dremel out and fix it…
Just use a couple dabs of hot glue, or blue tack.
Duct tape?
That’d probably be fine, you could make it look nice and trim or just slap it on there.
I bought a house last year and one of the switch boxes was filled with caulk to hold the switches in place. I’ve seen a lot of caulk abuse over the years but never anything like that.
Don’t abuse your caulk folks.
git blame
Ah, shit.
Nope doesn’t count. Me from a month ago is a whole different person. Fuck that guy.
And future me? What has that guy ever done for me? Fuck that guy too.
This right here is the proof that programmers are engineers.
I was about to say “Yeah, but electricians are pissed off because if they fuck up, fire happens.”
But then I remembered THERAC-25.
THERAC-25 strikes me as a case of when programmers fuck up people get radiation poisoning
