Tim Fischer wrote:
Jeff, good post, but my need to nitpick kicked in ;-)


If he made that many errors I think that before correcting things you
should have weighed whether your need to stay on speaking terms with him
was worth more than the risk that his slipshod ways might create a real
life threatening situation on the next job he did.


To be fair, nothing he did was particularly dangerous. With the panel so
close to the main panel, it's really splitting hairs as to why the grounds
need to be separated. If it's in another room/building/whatever certainly.
Not defending the guy's work, since it wasn't to code, but it isn't really a
safety problem that I can see...


I would have asked him to correct things pronto, and if he gave me any BS
about it being ok as is, I'd have asked the local electrical inspector to
drop over and look at the job.


Contractors are not immune from electrical inspections -- the inspector
SHOULD have dropped by. This was yet another violation.


it would be my bad luck to have the buyer's home inspector decide to
eyeball that disconnect switch and then force me to have to hire and pay a
licensed electrician to make it right.


They can't FORCE you to do anything. At worse, they could back out of the
sale. If this situation had come up in a sale and they wanted it fixed, you
can be darned sure I'd be fixing it myself, unless of course they want to
pay to have an electrician do it. I think just about every house has some
sort of 'violation' like this, so I think if a buyer were that picky, they
wouldn't be finding any home. But I can't blame you for making sure it was
done right.

I agree that FORCE was too strong a word. But if the situation occurred
while we were in the "short strokes" of closing on the house, then I'm
pretty sure I'd do whatever necessary even if it cost a few hundred
bucks for Alec (Alec Trician) to keep us from having to start over again
attracting a buyer for a (not bragging) million buck home.

And while I damn sure could do it myself, and probably neater and more
workmanlike than that second HVAC tech did last spring, I believe the
buyer's lawyer would be within his rights to require that the work be
done by a licensed electrician, which I'm not; An MSEE from '58 don't
count for that. :-)


As an aside (and I have no idea if this meets code or not), the low-voltage
wire from our HVAC unit to the outside unit is standard romex! I was poking
around in the ceiling of the utility room one time and was shocked (not
literally, thankfully) to find a wirenutted connection from the romex to a
standard T-stat type wire!


I'm guessing that your compressor unit requires just a simple relay
pull-in needing only two conductors, or did they use multiple pieces of
Romex?

I'm not a licensed expert, but I can't think of any technical reason why
Romex wouldn't be fine.

You just reminded me that about ten years ago when I had to find out
what was wrong with one of our heat pumps I discovered after many
mutterings of "WTF" that when we built the house the sods who'd run the
five conductor control line to the compressor unit I was fixing had to
have made a hidden splice in the control cable between the air handler
and the compressor.

The insulation colors on two of the five leads "changed" from one end of
the run to the other. After about an hour ringing them out (I was
working alone at the time) I found and replaced the relay with an open
coil, which was the real problem, and all was well.

I put a note about those chameleon wire colors in my household "HVAC" file.

Jeff

--
Jeffry Wisnia

(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)

"Truth exists; only falsehood has to be invented."