ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Final Inspection

We have been going backwards for years, some of the older homes we work in have complete plan sets signed with electricians name, period 1908, and before, days of real craftsman, not wire hacks, while spending many hours in a local hospital,that had floors updated, i seen some real sloppy work, fixtures hung off center , cover plate not level or plum, real slop work, i was talking to one of the maint guys, and he said the electrical sub bid so low he had to hack the work so not to loose too much, sign of the times, are there any contractors, atill around that take pride in their work?

In my mom's house, some of the rooms are fed by multiple circuits. Like an outlet in one corner of a bedroom is powered by a circuit that also feeds most of another adjacent bedroom. So that makes the labeling more interesting... . "East bedroom 1st floor, South bedroom 1st floor, basement workshop lights." Though any experienced and knowledgable sparky should know to expect such and tests each outlet or light switch before touching it.

Surely all the contractors in this forum do.

There are two approaches I've used.

In particularly complex places, I've actually copied the "you are here" exit maps, and drawn in my circuits - using different color high-lighters for different areas.

On a lighter note, in one building I labeled office circuits, describing the office location in terms of it's geographical location. However, since the hall ran north/south, the offices were divided into 'east' and 'west' groups. This had the unintended result of there being a 'mid-west' office ... and a 'mid-east' one as well.

Definitely, but how do you distinguish between several bedrooms, or worse, in an apartment where a room could be either living room or bedroom or whatever?

I have that problem myself and never found a real good solution. In my own place I ended up labeling "Back room" "Front left", "front right". Is there a better way without supplying a floor plan and numbering the rooms?

In commercial locations we simply label every receptacle with the circuit number.

Our system: the incoming feed of any given panel is split up into groups with main fuses. Then each group contains 6 breakers.

The numbers are coded 4 digit numbers. The first digit is the purpose (like 1 = lighting, 2= receptacles, 3= dedicated computer receptacles, 4= hard wired devices), the second and thrid are the group and the fourth is the circuit number, so for example the first group fuses is F101 and the first lighting breaker is F1011.

I will second the utility of marking at the junction boxes and devices.

When correct, these methods are a tremendous help; for the fastidious, you can make the marking on the inside face of the cover plate.

The only drawbacks are that breakers tend to get re-arranged during construction .... and the plates get all shuffled when the painter (hopefully) takes them off.

Well, in the large commercial projects we're dealing with there are plans of course. I recently looked into a fairly new commercial panel and found some 40 pages of diagrams and plans . In residential construction things get more interesting... usually no documentation at all, especially in multi-family buildings the owner gets the documentation and any electrician called by the tenant gets to guess.

A couple of weeks ago my cousin asked me to look over the wiring of his newly rented early 1980s apartment (many tenants here prefer to fix up the place at their own cost rather than argument with the landlord to get things fixed even if the landlord were legally obliged to do so). Opening the panel I found everything nicely labeled. "Range", "Dishwasher" "Washing machine", "plugs and lights kitchen+bath" and "lights and plugs everything else". Talk about load distribution...
Devices had been replaced by previous tenants, so labels on the device wouldn't have helped. Junction box covers had been removed and the walls were just wall papered over the open bixes... so no help either.

It took me quite some time to ring out all the wiring and for example determine where the supply for the rotted outdoor wiring originated (I had to disconnect it until it gets fixed and it's just tapped off the regular wiring at the weirdest points).

So my point is: in residential onstrcution there is hardly anything you can do to account for DIY stupidity, might as well label nothing except at the panel.

My grandmother's place is another nice example why panel directories are often useless... well, nice to know there are breakers "Plugs I", "Plugs II" and "Plugs III", but no idea what they actually control... (well, in fact so far I didn't find anything they control, all the receptacles seem to be connected to the lighting circuits).

I start by calling Bedroom #1 "Master Bedroom". Bedroom #2 and so on clockwise from the Master Bedroom (Bedroom #1). I put a description of this in the panel of how I decided to do so.

I am 100% with reno on this one. I actually use a pocket that is self adhesive on one side and made of clear plastic. I stick the pocket to the inside of the door, and then print out a card on glossy photo paper and slip it in. The advantages are many. One glaring benifit is that changes can be made without having to black-out an old description and write another in. That method is sloppy and not what I like to see when I go into a panel for service work.

I recently was at an old house to find a dead circuit in the panel. The guy who owned the house now was an architect, and his dad, who had died several years ago, was an old school architect as well and had bought the house new in the early 60s. The dad had drawn up a beautiful floorplan of the house on cross-section grid paper, color coded the outlets, fixtures, and other devices, and included a color coded breaker directory that matched the floor plan. He then laminated the plan and adheared the whole thing to the inside of the panel door. It was the most useful, understandable, graphically correct, and time-saving panel directory I have ever seen.

If the guy was still alive, I would have bought him the finest steak dinner in town for that stroke of genius and attention to detail.

The point is, the clearer and more detailed a directory is, the better. Remember, the guy who comes in later is just like you - trying to make a living. Why not make everybody happier and go the extra mile. The legal obligation in 408.4 is only the starting point, not the limit.

Good luck!

The ;label breakers' requirement, I think, is a good example to illustrate where good design differs from poor. and how poor design cannot be 'fixed' by the rule book.

Let's face it ... by the time you're labeling the breakers, the damage has already been done.

The first nightmare is commonly found in residential construction, where the same circuit is used to power both sides of a wall. In practice, this has often meant that the common wall between the living room and the dining room was on one circuit, while the common wall between that same living room and a bedroom were on another. Try describing that clearly in the panel directory!
Another example is the lighting; while often on separate circuits, the circuit hops all over the place - again, often resulting in a difficult situation to describe.

The second nightmare comes up in 'tenant improvement' work, where commercial suites are divided, combined, walls are added and removed, receptacles are added and removed, over time. I had one place where, when I killed a circuit to tie in a new receptacle, a receptionist three offices (and two panels) down the hall lost her computer!

The only real way to keep this from happening is to ... stop taking the easy way out. Yesterday, I had a mini-mart ask me to quote adding some sign receptacles over the front windows. Sure, I could just tie into any convenient circuit - how much power do beer signs use, anyway? - but that just might setting the stage for a real problem later. If nothing else, it would complicate the ID at the panel. The only way to 'do it right' - and clean up some prior messes, address some other issues, as well - is to redo a few other circuits at the same time, all the way back to the panel.
Naturally, this in turn means doing the work while the business is closed - or at least, not very busy. Say, 3-10AM Sunday. I can hardly wait

Been wirein' fer 34 years, never, I repeat never have I split a curcit like that.
Oh, I take it back, I have used hallway receptacles on the same circuit as the wall it's on.