Every home has its quirks...

Every home has its quirks ... and Friday I found the first big one in our new home, up here in Paradise, Utah.  It's a doozy :)

I did some electrical wiring work in our TV room because of the new piece of ceiling that now covers the previously-exposed heating duct.  All of this work was simple, straightforward wiring – Romex, wire nuts, and junction boxes, nothing fancy.  The biggest part of this work was to wire up four new recessed lighting fixtures, and that all worked on the first try.  I also wired up a new utility box for our (wired) fire alarm in that room.  When I finished wiring it, I re-installed the alarm to test it before I buttoned up the work.

The test failed – there was no “juice” to the alarm.  I figured that I must have somehow blown a circuit breaker while doing the wiring, so down to the electrical panel I went.  No joy – none of the breakers had blown, nor were any of them off.  Now I noticed that all the fire alarms were without power.  Yikes!

My next thought was that maybe they were powered from the relatively new sub-panel in the basement.  Down the two flights of stairs I went, and searched the sub-panel.  No joy, again.

Then I remember that I had done some really minor work in another basement room (the big room that we're going to use as an indoor cattery), removing a bunch of duplex outlets that were poorly installed, and that we'd never use.  Maybe I accidentally disconnected the fire alarm circuit!  Down into the basement I went again, and checked that circuit.  No joy, again – it was reconnected correctly and had juice.  I noticed, however, that the lights in that room, and on the basement stairway, were no longer working.

What the heck was going on?

I climbed back up to the second floor, where Lane and Pasquale were working hard, and decided to just sit and think for a few minutes.  It acted exactly as if a breaker was blown, or a circuit disconnected – but I couldn't find any place where that had happened!  Lane came over to commiserate, and offered to talk it over with me in the hopes of coming up with an idea.  In the course of doing that, he asked if it was possible that a GFI (ground fault interrupter) device had tripped somewhere.  I couldn't imagine that anyone would be crazy enough to put fire alarms and lighting on the same GFI circuit, but Lane said he'd seen much worse than that.  Then both of us remembered, at the same moment, seeing a GFI outlet in an unlikely place – near the floor in the big room that we're going to use as a cattery.  We went down there, and sure enough that GFI was tripped.  I pushed the little red button ... and the lights came back on in that room.  Next room over, the fire alarm's green LED was glowing brightly.  We ran back upstairs, and – all the alarms were now happily glowing green again.  Even the one I had just wired was working correctly.

So someone, sometime, had wired two duplex outlets, the track lights in the cattery room, the basement stair lights, and all 10 fire alarms in the house onto the same circuit – all “protected” by a single small GFI device.  Oh, my.  That's another thing on my long list of things that need to get fixed :)