I’ve got nothing for New Year’s Eve. Hold on, the Hippie called. He’s doing a vegetarian restaurant out near Sunny Isles. So that is more of a jam session or open mic, which he does a lot of. That’s around seven miles from here. We might get together for a couple hours on Tuesday to dust off some of the standards from our old song list.Arnel called as well, we’ll meet up for a few tunes tonight at Boston’s. Arnel has a bicycle carrier that fixes on with straps. He says it will work on a station wagon and I can have it. I don’t trust the straps because they can be cut, but if it gets my bicycle up to Ft. Lauderdale I’ll be happy. I know every crack in every sidewalk in this old town.
Determined not to spend another summer with more air conditioning than necessary, I finally ran in that extra circuit for the air conditioner in my bedroom. It makes far more sense to cool just the area one is using. The down side is this install required eight hours. The existing wiring had to be redone from the panel. Those five years I spent with the commercial electric company taught me to do everything to top standard. Daryl and I used to triple check everything before the inspector showed up and we had top company ratings at every high-rise we worked on together (Mandarin Oriental, Four Seasons, Continuum, Espiritu Santo).
That means I had to upgrade a lot of what I found under the house. Everything is finally up off the ground and properly connected to the bus bar. I found some very bad wiring so rather than fix it, I cut it off in situ and bypassed it with new Romex throughout. The previous wiring was bad and in some cases unsafe. I found white and black connected backwards to the buss, circuits wrongly wired for 220, out of phase sockets and mixed box to receptacle grounds. Everything is now to commercial spec.
All the extension cords are gone from my computer area. The overhead fan lulls the cat into afternoon naps and I can put things away permanently since I don’t have to craw behind anything anymore. I am still going to run one more line from the panel to ensure the utility room is on a private circuit. That’s where the 110V washer is located. It was previously tapped off the spare bedroom, which is now on two circuits. Note that when it was tapped, I measured duplex outlets with as little as 78V per socket.
Mistake of the day club. I ran short a junction box and a cathedral base light bulb. Barnet’s is open Sundays, so I biked over. Yikes, the box was $4 and the bulb was $3. True, Barnet’s has stock left over from the Civil War, but you pay through the nose for it. At Home Depot I would have spent around $1.50. I’m glad Barnet’s is there even if they are the convenience store of the hardware route.
