An Attic Adventure
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Knowing
they’d been betrayed, the King issued an edict:
Henceforth it was forbidden to attempt feeding both a hair dryer and the
wall monster at the same time. And
they lived with this sorry condition for uncounted years until serendipity
provided a sufficient period of inactivity during which the fertile and ever
churning mind of the king formulated a solution.
And such a daring solution it was, for it would require sojourns through
many attics, pulling and poking wires into places they did not wish to go.
At times, our rotund adventurer would face teeny tiny crawl spaces lined
with fiberglass insulation, under the castle roof, at high noon, with
temperatures pushing 115 (that was a bit much, even for us southern boys).
But sheer blind determination drove them onwards, to the inevitable
conclusion.
So, here’s the technical part. You see, the switch for the heater was located on the
bathroom wall, and shared it’s power connection with several other switches,
AND the wall plugs around the sink (hence the unhappy hairdryer connection).
There was no way I could get to that switch with a new power wire,
because it was deeply buried beneath many layers of house.
However, the wire that ran from the switch to the heater went through the
ceiling, then down through the other wall, and that presented an avenue of
attack. If I could splice into that
wire at the header plate of the wall, then I could fix the problem.
I would cut the wire in half, and take just a little power from the
switch to control a ‘relay’. That
relay would then control the new power source which I would send down the other
half of the wire to the heater. Sounds
simple, you say?? Just try to find
an electromechanical relay that likes switching a 110 volt, 1600 watt resistive
load, that also has a 110 volt actuator coil.
You might be able to find some military surplus from the power room of a
nuclear submarine that would handle the task, but otherwise, forget it!
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Knowing
they’d been betrayed, the King issued an edict:
Henceforth it was forbidden to attempt feeding both a hair dryer and the
wall monster at the same time. And
they lived with this sorry condition for uncounted years until serendipity
provided a sufficient period of inactivity during which the fertile and ever
churning mind of the king formulated a solution.
And such a daring solution it was, for it would require sojourns through
many attics, pulling and poking wires into places they did not wish to go.
At times, our rotund adventurer would face teeny tiny crawl spaces lined
with fiberglass insulation, under the castle roof, at high noon, with
temperatures pushing 115 (that was a bit much, even for us southern boys).
But sheer blind determination drove them onwards, to the inevitable
conclusion.