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Posted By: renosteinke Do I laugh, or cry? - 10/20/08 05:14 PM
On another forum, a homeowner was having some problems with the AFCI circuits in his home. I decided to try to help him find the problem ....

My desire was frustrated by others who had several, uh, interesting 'solutions.' Everyone seemed to dislike my general 'stop guessing and get methodical' approach. The icing on the cake, though, was this post:

"No, have no documentation. But then I've never actually seen an AFCI, except in the store."

It's too bad that we all face this sort of thing on a regular basis .... trying to do our jobs, while being second-guessed by folks who really ought to do something else. Too often, we get called in to clean up their messes.

That particular post came from an .... well, I don't want to single out one profession. Suffice it to say the gentleman is laboring under the handicap of a college education, and working in a fiels where everyone seems to become an instant expert the moment they first hear of something. No, he doesn't drive a train. wink

Apart from letting me vent .... a valuable service of ECN laugh ..... this thread ought to remind us all of some of the absolute silliness out there .... especially on the internet.

What's the silliest thing you've heard, put forth by some supposed expert?
Posted By: gfretwell Re: Do I laugh - or cry? - 10/20/08 06:14 PM
I saw that thread and I wouldn't touch it with a 10' hot stick. When you add unqualified people to the mythology that has come up around AFCIs there will be no winning that fight.
I agree this is probably a neutral problem but finding it
is beyond the capabilities of the OP.

BTW I had my neighbor call an electrician the other day myself. He was tripping the breaker for one of the kitchen SA circuits with the GFCI tripped and I knew it had to be something strange. Above my pay grade. I am just a lowly inspector and I just knew there was a violation wink
Turns out they had grabbed that circuit for the dock receptacle on the line side of the counter top GFCI.

This is the same guy who had the dead receptacles I wrote about in the spring. That turned out to be a GFCI behind a cabinet in the garage (that he swore wasn't there).
I did have the right wall where the "buried" box I suspected, was. He swore up and down that GFCI was not there when he put the cabinet there.
Posted By: twh Re: Do I laugh - or cry? - 10/20/08 08:35 PM
It's hard to pick the silliest thing, but all the really bad ideas come from electricians.

I had a maintenance electrician for an oil company give me a stick to wedge into a contactor to keep an oil well running while we waited for a new coil.

Another electrician ran two 120 volt feeds from a panel to a wall pack - one for the built-in photocell and one for the light.

Then there was the electrician who threw the thermostat away when he installed a baseboard heater. He thought it was self-regulating.

My favorite is the electrician who thought that a plc analoq card failed because the transmitter was improperly calibrated. A tank was 50% full, the transmitter was showing only 40%. He said the card failed when it tried to reconcile the difference.
Posted By: gfretwell Re: Do I laugh - or cry? - 10/20/08 09:34 PM
I hear people who should know better say some dumb things. My favorite is when you have low voltage and they say the heater element will be drawing more current. "Watts does equal amps times volts ... right?"
Sometimes it takes a long time to explain "R" didn't change.
Posted By: dougwells Re: Do I laugh - or cry? - 10/21/08 01:32 AM
bump
testing thread seems to be a problem accessing it from the thread list
Posted By: gfretwell Re: Do I laugh - or cry? - 10/21/08 04:17 AM
I had the same thing. If you just do a "next" or "Previous" it works.
Posted By: gfretwell Re: Do I laugh - or cry? - 10/21/08 04:18 AM
It also works if you select from the right pane of the index
Posted By: dougwells Do I laugh, or cry? - 10/22/08 12:00 AM
There seemed to be a problem with this thread so you may have to scroll up to read the beginning
thanks
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