Nate Nagel wrote:

...when a young man's thoughts turn to all the home repair projects he's
been putting off "until it warms up a little."

Next project: rewiring the upstairs. The whole second floor of my house
is wired on one 15A circuit, with ungrounded NM cable. Eventual plan is
to rewire the whole thing with modern Romex, replace ceiling boxes with
deeper ones with fan supports, and at the same time, drop 14/3 switch
legs to all the bedroom switch boxes to allow for possible future
installation and wall control of ceiling fans in bedrooms. I seriously
doubt that I will be able to complete this project all in one day, so
here's my plan.

Day one, I will get up in the attic and assess the wiring layout of the
upstairs. Unfortunately, I have already determined that the homerun is
on the side of the house *opposite* the master bedroom. Thus, if I
logically separate the two sides of the house into two circuits, unless
I get the second homerun pulled the first day, I can't restore power to
the MBR. So here's the idea - there is one recep. in the hallway that
is on its own, dedicated 20A circuit (I assume for a window mounted air
conditioner.) I am fairly confident that I can at least assess the work
to be done and separate the MBR and bath from the other side of the
house the first day, even if I can get nothing else done.

My thought is that I could rig a suicide cord from the A/C recep to one
of the receps in the MBR to maintain power in there, and then I can work
on the other side at my leisure. Then once I'm all warmed up and have
gotten my procedure down on the non-critical side of the house, I
hopefully can knock the MBR side out in a day (it's actually less
complex; the other side has two bedrooms and a small hallway.) The
problem, of course, is that the A/C recep. is on a 20A breaker and the
MBR wiring is all 14AWG. Is there such a thing as a fuseholder or
circuit breaker that can be mounted in a handy box inline with the cord
to keep everything safe and copacetic? Ideally I'd have a fuseholder
and an inline GFCI recep. as I could see such a rig being useful for
future projects as well, some of which might be outdoors/in wet areas/etc.

I guess worst case I could temporarily install a 15A breaker in the box
and move the A/C homerun to that, is that actually the easiest solution?

thanks for any advice...

nate

--
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Pull your new circuits up to a suitable box in the attic first before
messing with any of the existing wiring, then just separate / rewire the
appropriate areas and tie in to the appropriate new circuits as you go
with minimal outages.

If it's logistically feasible run a conduit up to a decent sized pull
box (8x8x4 perhaps) so you can pull as many circuits as you need such as
MBR on an AFCI breaker, bath on a GFCI breaker, dedicated A/C circuit,
etc. One step further would be installing a small sub panel in the
attic.

Remember, materials are pretty cheap, your labor / time is not. If you
have to expend the effort fishing wire and patching walls be sure to
plan for the future and leave extra capacity, or ideally conduit runs
where you can pull additional wire when needed.

Pete C.