The Dark Side of the Electrical Trade

No, this isn't some deep creepy post. Or even one about Darth Vader. It's about something a lot worse.

Night shift.

It sounds alright and all at first. It's a four day week, Monday through Thursday nights, 9pm 'til 6am the next morning, paid for 10 hours. And then there's the shift differential. An extra 15% for working while the rest of the world is sleeping. And if you're young and single it's probably well worth it. But if you have a family it's absolutely wreaks havoc on anything resembling normal life. You only get a few hours each evening with your family between when they get home and when you have to leave for work. And then you spend most of the weekend trying to catch up on sleep because no matter how much you sleep during the day you're still exhausted all the time.

Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled to be working and the three months I spent in various grocery stores rewiring security systems while the customers were out of the store was MUCH better than being furloughed - which is how a bunch of guys at my company ended up. But it really does a number on your life. Especially since my wife and I were trying to buy a house - an incredibly stressful and crazy process to begin with!

Luckily, after three months of toughing it out, everything has seemed to work out for the best. My wife and I found a great new house (we're moving on Saturday) and I've been transferred to a dayshift job incredibly close to where I live. I have plenty to be thankful for this Thanksgiving season.

Expect a more rested and talkative blogger in the future.

Congratulations

I just wanted to congratulate my fellow JATC Local 26 blogger Tarn for a wonderful write up in The Electrical Worker, the publication that the IBEW sends out to all members. She is an inspiration to us all to stay involved in the Local as well as the national and international goings-on that have such a large impact on our careers and our lives.

New Year, New Company...

It's that time of year again. August is all about hot weather and getting transferred. The JATC has each apprentice transfer to a new company each year to ensure that he or she sees a wide range of different aspects of the electrical industry. My first company (or at least the division I worked for) did work exclusively in hospitals. My second company was a large company that had me working in large data centers and on large federal jobs where I was lucky enough to get some excellent experience in low-voltage work.

My new company is much smaller than either of my first two companies. It has been doing electrical work for grocery stores, both new work and renovations/remodels for years. The power aspects of a grocery store are actually rather unique. The coolers and freezers require special attention especially because a loss of power (and with it cooling) would result in a huge loss of product (and money!) Each cooler is monitored separately, though I've been working on a power crew, not a control crew.

What I have been doing is replacing fluorescent fixtures with LED fixtures. Sounds pretty straight forward, doesn't it? It is. The only catch is that the fixtures are in the coolers and freezers! After weeks of working in the hot weather I'm carrying my sweat shirt and jacket to work because the coolers are 37 degrees and the freezers are -30!

So far I'm pretty thrilled to be working out of the heat.

The Importance of Reading Directions

This post could also be called 'Pay Attention, Especially if You Think You Know What You're Doing.' (Clearly I managed to make a mistake of some sort.)

First a bit of background. In the fire alarm / low voltage world wiring isn't usually a hot, a neutral and a ground. Wiring is almost always only a positive and a negative. The rule for wire identification is that the darker (usually black) is negative and the lighter wire (usually red) is red.

The fire alarm system I'm installing has MANY components, but the problem revolved around the speakers and the combination speaker/strobes. The speakers have two terminals on the back with a brown lead and a white lead leading away from the terminals. The speaker circuit is a blue cable consisting of on red #16 wire and one black #16 wire. Logic dictates that the red wire (the lighter one) goes under the white terminal and the black wire (the darker one) goes under the black terminal. And, lucky for me, that turns out to be the correct way to wire the speaker.

The combination speaker/strobes have four terminals on the back, two (red & black) for the strobe and two (white and brown) for the speaker. The circuit for the strobe is two separate #14 THHNs with the light/dark color combinations depending upon which circuit the strobe is a part. The red and black terminals are labeled "S" for strobe and the wires are landed exactly how you'd expect. The speaker terminals, again white & brown, however, are NOT what you'd expect. After installing more than 50 of these, I noticed that there was something molded into the plastic beside the speaker terminals. The brown terminal was labeled 'SPKR' and the white terminal was labeled 'C' for common. In the low voltage world the negative (darker) wire is used as the common wire.

The two devices are from the same manufacturer. Each on has a speaker component. Each speaker is fed from a brown and white terminal. Except the color's polarities aren't consistent.

At least my foreman was understanding.

So, after that long and boring story, the root: I installed all of the speaker/strobes incorrectly because I put the darker speaker wire under the darker terminal. The moral of the story being that no matter how straight forward you think a task is, pay attention and read the directions.

Excuse me while I clean off the cobwebs...

So, it's been a few months. I wish I could point to some exciting reason why I've been unable to post lately. I wish I could say I was busy working endless weeks of six twelves. (Well, actually it's only my bank account that wishes it was endless 72 hour weeks.) I wish I could say I'd spent my last three months of weekends driving up and down the east coast writing reviews of different beaches. But really it's been the 'busy' that goes along with normal life that's kept me running from one place to another.

We finished the security system at MDA a month or so ago and I've moved on to a fire alarm system for another building on Fort Belvior. After a bit of reluctance at the beginning I'm really enjoying low voltage work. It's exciting because there's more going on than just delivering voltage to lights and outlets. I have loops of smoke detectors that need to be monitored and powered. Fire alarm and mass notification strobes and speakers are wired back to termination cabinets and then into the computerized fire alarm system. While I'm still doing all the fundamental things that 'normal' electricians do, pulling wire and making terminations, the variation and technical nature of what I'm doing is challenging. Circuits need to be wired with key-switched test points and relays need to be wired to allow the 24 volt fire alarm system to operate the 120 volt duct dampers. I get to be inside the roof top units (RTUs) that control the ventilation systems and connect into the rather complicated wiring systems for the HVAC system.

Yeah, like I said, complicated. And incidentally, this is what we're about to start dealing with in class - motor control and building automation. I'm actually really excited. The project for the book is to create a ladder diagram like the one in the second photo for an imaginary piece of a manufacturing facility.

Hopefully I won't regret my enthusiasm!

The Scramble at the End

My time working on the security crew at my job will soon come to an end - as soon as we finish the security system. The last week will be taken up with work on every single kind of loose end imaginable. It's not that we've been irresponsible about getting aspects of the system completed. Security work is almost COMPLETELY reliant on other trades to have their work done on time and correctly. You can't install a door contact on a door that isn't there. You can't wire the handset of a lock when the door that was ordered is incorrect, lacking a raceway from the electric hinge to the handset. But these problems all work themselves out eventually. They're stressful, but the last few weeks of a security install are the best.

Security work begins with endless days of pulling teeny-tiny wire from every secure door to the security panel. Different doors would get different combinations of cable. Sometimes two 18/2s, a 22/4, and a 12/2. Sometimes just one 18/2, a 22/8, a 22/4, and a 12/2. Keeping everything organized and strapped down neatly in the cable tray is tedious and slow-moving work. Not at all exciting and when I first found myself on the security crew I was something less than thrilled about it.

After all the cables were pulled, however, life on the security crew improved dramatically. Installing RRE panels (the computers that controlled each door's security) and card readers, keypads and door contacts was rewarding. Wiring each of these pieces of equipment and setting up the panels and server racks back in the security closet was a lot of fun. 'Normal' electrical work is pretty straight forward. Voltage, phase, hot, neutral and ground. But in the security world it's low-voltage DC power and circuit boards that make up functional system. Having dip switches set appropriately and ensuring that the correct wires are landed in the correct location on a terminal strip depending on the configuration of a door was anything but mindless drudgery.

As I mentioned above, it's when the system is substantially complete and mostly up and running that the real fun begins. Trying to trouble shoot the doors that won't come on-line requires a systematic approach and an understanding of how the system works, both in the computer controlling the system and electrically over the length of the circuit.

I've been very lucky to land in security work. I've gotten to install some pretty high-tech pieces of equipment. I've installed, wired, brought on-line, aimed and addressed video cameras that cost more than my car. I've built and installed a server system with 44 terabytes of memory. I've wired transformers and rectifiers. I've dealt with fiber optics. I'll miss it when the project wraps up at the end of next week and I'm off to another job.

It's almost February?!?

Well, the holidays are finally over. They were great but they seemed to last forever!

Security work has been growing on me. It took a bit of getting used to but I finally feel normal carrying around a tiny little control screwdriver and a set of strippers that only go up to 18 wire. The security system we've been working on is pretty extensive for a modestly sized building. There are card readers to wire, motion sensors to install, key pads to mount and a 'blue light' system that uses push switches to set off blue strobes in a room to signal that a non-Top Secret cleared person is in the room. There's a switch and a strobe in every room and hall in the secure area. I suggested that we just build a hat with a battery powered blue strobe mounted on top that visitors could wear to save money on the install but nobody seemed to think a helmet with a blinking blue light was a good idea.

And inevitably, as the deadlines get closer, the pressure builds.

Today we were supposed to finish pulling the fiber optic cables out to the poll-mounted cameras in the parking lot. Of course as soon as we started we discovered that the company doing the site grading had crushed all of our PVC. So instead of pulling we ended up digging.

One of the roof mounted cameras had to be reinstalled after the mounting plate started to pull out. Doors that need locks wired were either ordered improperly or sent from the factory with out the correct holes drilled.

And that's just this week. But the challenges are fun and the overtime is appreciated. I'll leave you with a little bit of proof that a break spent stuck on a snowy roof doesn't need to be boring.