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Jim McLaughlin Jim McLaughlin is offline
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Default Blades -- A home repair mystery -- ceiling fans

Well written.

Thank you.

I wish I had some idea of a diagnosis or cure to offer you.

You have earned it.

--
Jim McLaughlin

Reply address is deliberately munged.
If you really need to reply directly, try:
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And you know it is a dotnet not a dotcom
address.
"Lou Zher" wrote in message
...
It was a dark and muggy night. I was working late and got home to a home
full of thick damp July night air. I switched on a ceiling fan, but it

just
stood there, as still and quiet as the soggy bleakness of the Midwest
summer. "Hmmph. Another broken ceiling fan." You see, in this house there
are only seven ceiling fans, and more than half of them have met an

untimely
death in the last year. I can't say for sure that this is a serial

killing,
and autopsies are hard to come by, but here's the facts about the ceiling
fans: the master bedroom, the kitchen and the den have the three working
ones; the gazebo, the entryway, and the other two bedrooms have the four
that have failed this year. I'm no 60 cycle gumshoe, I prefer the safety

and
comfort of digital logic, but I did try rebooting the house, one
circuit-breaker at a time and hunting down all the GFCI resets... no

effect.
A check of the neighborhood revealed hotness on the wall switches leading

to
the fans. Is my luck really that bad? What do these poor victims have in
common, other than they are fans? I needed answers like I needed air
movement. Could some sort of electrical tsunami simple wash upon my shores
and vanish, laying waste to these hearty induction motors whilst sparing

all
my more delicate and expensive electronics? "Well, maybe I'm not so

unlucky
after all," I mumbled out loud. Could it be that a house would be wired

with
four ceiling fans, sort of scattered around the house, on a common

circuit?
Could it be that this circuit has suddenly failed in a way that didn't
merely trip the breaker? Could it really be that one of these failed

ceiling
fans has a separate circuit for its attached lighting? A problem as sticky
as the heavy motionless mass fogging up my glasses, a problem for the fine
folks at ahr to help me out with.
-LZ