Service Calls With Electrician U!!!

what's going on my friends i am dustin stelzer with electrician you and uh today we have another couple of service calls seems like all of y'all are really liking uh going out in the field with me so today we have three service calls that we're going to cover [Music] the first service call is a repeat service call so i went out to this customer's house they kept reporting that they were having power outages and it seemed like it was the whole house but they weren't sure if it was just the lighting they didn't check all the plugs all that jazz so the first time that i went out there which was not today this was a couple weeks ago there was a zinsco main that was a 50 amp zinsko main that was really old that was the first thing that i noticed and i'm like all right i'm like 90 positive that that is the problem but because there's so many loose terminations everywhere i'm just gonna go ahead and tighten every single one of these while i've got all the panels open anyways and i don't have a replacement breaker on me in my van so i would have to get that and come back for another visit anyway so i was like all right i think a good thing to do would just be to say look let's try there's a there's a few things that that could be the problem let's just knock uh each one of them off the list so the first thing i did was just take care of all of the tightening of all of the different terminations on the breakers and feeders and service entrance conductors and i told her i'm probably gonna have to come back for a breaker because i think the real problem is that old ass breaker from like the 60s or 70s but i said i don't want to just go buy a breaker and then put it in and then we still have a problem so i would rather if it saves you some money i would rather just tighten all of these terminations and then leave and see if that takes care of the problem and in the meantime i will source a breaker connecticut electric actually makes replacement breakers and i can get a replacement breaker for this if the problem still persists so i set my calendar i set like a little notification alarm for two weeks out and i was like in the next two weeks you know she's saying that this is happening like every day every other day so if we go two weeks and there's not a problem then i know just tightening all of the terminations solved the problem so we went two weeks i called her back no problems i haven't heard anything so i was like all right cool that was the problem that zinsco breaker's probably gonna be replaced pretty soon anyways but at least i didn't like overcharge her for something unnecessary right well i you not the next day she calls me and she's like hey power went out again i'm like all right well i will be out there tomorrow so today i'm going out and i open everything back up um i'm suspect of this breaker for sure this old zinsco breaker it looked decrepit it looked all worn on the bottom and so i went and got one of these connecticut electric actually makes brand new replacement breakers so if you're ever in a situation like this don't go use like the old that you're ripping out of other houses i know i used to do it too a lot of electricians do they'll just hang on to these really old kind of like rare breakers because in that weird situation where you're out in the middle of the boondocks and like you need to come up with one of these breakers you've got one in your van or in your truck but they actually make brand new ones so in this case i didn't want to just put something old and shitty and then she'd just keep having problems with it so i went and got a brand new breaker she had a two pole 50 which was a skinny two pole 50. i had a fat tupol 50 and i knew either one would work in the situation that i had but i knew going into it that that was what i was going to need so i went to home depot and got one really easy you can also go to bigelectricsupply.com and get them i actually have a link in the description below if you just want to order some code electrician you gets you a discount off of them so check that in the link description below so i put this new breaker in it was very easy just ripped the other one out put the new one in put it in place nothing else about the system changed i had already gone and done all the changes in the termination so i knew at this point i had checked everything from this main forward through the system and she was saying it was everything in the house that was shutting off it wasn't just a couple of circuits or a couple of lights it was happening throughout the entire house so i knew that it was something at the service i didn't i knew it wasn't something out like a sub panel or at a plug or a switch because it was affecting the entire house so i felt pretty confident about that but i did tell her when i was leaving i was like look there is a slight possibility that this is not the problem either i think that it is but you know i don't know that you're not like losing a phase every once in a while and there's something wrong inside your meter or something weird like that so i was like let's just monitor it again another two weeks goes by i'll check in with you and we'll see how everything's working and if there's no problems then i feel good that that was that was the problem so sometimes that you don't have like a clear answer right as service techs in the electrical field or you know plumbing hvac like we're always going into environments that are like weird shits happening most of the time when we get there it's not there anymore you know so we're like chasing down an unknowns and chasing down a ghost and we're taking stories from people and their advice and trying to figure out kind of do detective work so this is a perfect situation like that where i didn't really know i wasn't able to replicate the problem i was just trusting their word but i think that i solved the problem all right so after that job um i went down the road i actually had like an hour and a half drive ahead of me this was on the complete other side of town for jobs like that where it's like really far away i have a um a trip charge that i charge for every trip that i take anywhere it's just extra margin that i build in profitability but it covers a lot of the vehicle expenses so i typically charge within 30 miles of where my shop is i charge a 50 trip charge and if it's anything more than that i charge 100 trip charge so this was in a situation where it was an hour and a half away it was probably like 46 miles or something like that but it was a double trip charge so just because of the distance typically i don't like to work this far away from home just because it's a pain in the ass to like have to drive that far back and forth every single day plus we're talking like way out in the middle of nowhere in the in like central texas in the hill country there's no supply houses around there's no home depots or anything around so it's really just a pain in the ass so i kind of charge a lot to drive from way out here to go way out there and uh a lot of people would ask like why wouldn't they just hire somebody local well way out in the sticks a lot of places they don't have very good electricians or very many electricians or they'll call and get somebody that says they're gonna show up and they don't show up so there's just a lot of shitty people out in the sticks you know what i mean uh i'm from the sticks i don't judge it's all right you know what i mean like i come from the same farm country stock i get it but a lot of the times they will call us in the city to come drive out there so anyways i just charge extra for that so this job was out at a school so i went to an elementary school like a pre-k kind of thing but they're getting ready for school to be back in session and they the call that i got was from an ac company so an hvac company had the contract with the school to put a whole bunch of new air handlers and air compressors in so all the acs outside all the air handlers in this whole entire building there was 12 of them 12 of each so it's a really big job for them but they get everything open and they start realizing there's no grounds to anything so none of the air handlers had a ground conductor it was just two hots and pipe and all of the air compressors that were outside same thing two grounds and pipe there was no equipment grounds now that's an approved wiring method [Music] what these people did was used the conduit the electrical metallic tubing emt they ran straight from the panel to one of these air handlers they did the same thing they actually did rigid for the compressors outside but they used that conduit as the ground so can we do that or can we not do that now if we open up uh 250 in article 250 of the national electric code that's what uh grounding and bonding is specifically in part six part vi roman numeral vi is six um that's where it talks about the types of equipment grounding conductors that we can use so you don't always have to use an actual conductor for your equipment grounding conductor you can use other things so um it says in 250.118 types of equipment grounding conductors the equipment grounding conductor run with or enclosing the circuit conductors enclosing the circuit conductors means a conduit or a raceway shall be one or more of the combination of the following either a copper aluminum copper cloud aluminum conductor solid or stranded insulated or bare number two rigid metal conduit so the compressors outside that were running rigid metal conduit as long as all your couplings and everything are fine and you've got a really tight connection it's actually an approved means of having an equipment grounded conductor be the conduit itself then you have number three intermediate metal conduit and number four electrical metallic tubing now it keeps going 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14. you can read through all of that if you want to figure out the different types of like mc and raceways and everything that they're considering in equipment grounding means but the problem in this situation is that we have a whole bunch of conduits and couplings that over the years probably since the 60s has been remodeled and things moved around and it's way out in bfe so this is like no codes no inspections for years and years and years and people doing more work and hack work and add none and taken away from systems half the male adapters were not even in the disconnects they there was no lock ring they were just like hanging there and there were conductors uh there's all kinds of stuff like um you know like just broken uh jacketed mc's hanging all over the place nobody used bat wings to support or secure any conduits or anything so like the continuity of the actual conduit being an effective ground fault means was not there at all so that's the part with emt you actually have to have tight couplings you have to have everything solid for the entire run so it is all one piece bonded together so that every coupling and an enclosure and conduit raceway everything is all touching that's how you can have emt actually be an equipment grounding conductor but if you lose a coupling connection you just lost the effective means from the load out there through the conduit all the way back to the other one there's a break in the conduit so it's not going to work for an equipment ground so in all in all reality while yes code says that you can use emt in this environment they had lost almost all of their grounds to almost all of the equipment so they called me in and they're like what can we do about this can we just go and like tighten all the couplings and connectors i'm like i think the better method is to add a conductor like to me personally i just like conductor dependent equipment grounding that's the means in which i like to wire things you can absolutely have just gone and redone all the couplings the fittings everything traced out all of that conduit everywhere to see every single junction box everywhere that it goes i didn't want to do that i was like no i'm just gonna get some new metal flex and i'm gonna get some new ground some number 10 ground i went sure and made sure that you know i sized everything correctly for the loads and i just ran new dedicated grounds from the panel to each piece of equipment all the way through the entire thing and i did it myself took me two trips to go out there i didn't work full days either day i just had a lot of other stuff going on but for me such an easy job i was able to charge a lot for that job being that it was out in the middle of nowhere and it was for a school district and it was a time sensitive thing because kids were coming back so they were just willing to pay to make sure that it was done but it was done right by the end of it everything was grounded properly all right so the last job for the day was a job back in town back closer to my studio this was a woman that had called uh got my name from a recommendation from somebody else another electrician that just didn't have time to get to this job and she needed a light fixture that she said her husband said was like a 40-foot extension ladder i'm like 40 feet like what the kind of light is it do i need a 40-foot extension lander that's a chandelier you know like where is this and they're like well it's outside on the front patio i'm like 40 feet for a front patio like i've done a lot of really high up scale homes i've never seen a 40 foot entryway to a house this is a castle um so anyways i just went out there uh and i brought a typical extension ladder because i was like people often dramatize their footage a lot of fishermen stories out there you know like i'm like this is probably a 12 foot chandelier and they just don't know what 40 feet means so i get out there and sure as it's just like a simple two-story house and it was 18 feet so like all right my extension ladder is gonna work just fine um so i changed that out while i was there they're like hey we just also bought a whole bunch of interior like vanity sconces that we want changed out too so i changed a whole bunch of them there was a back patio light that they tried to have me change out but they got the wrong fixture so i wasn't able to do anything with it this was a great day just three service calls super easy i was able to do everything on my own um didn't need a helper for anything and it was just a chill day that all day long i could have my ear pods in and blare music and that was pretty much it that was the whole day [Music] now one thing to bring up this is kind of a fun fact slash safety time i long time ago put a extension ladder on a rug many of you know where this is going rob done some stupid okay uh i say it often i don't hide from it i've done some stupid uh i was at the student's house really nice house like four million dollar house and i was on an extension ladder and they had a huge entryway like you get inside the house and there's this big entryway this huge ass chandelier and i get my extension ladder in there and they've got this big circle rug on wood floor and i put this extension ladder right in the middle of that thing and i leaned up on the wall and i'm feeling you know great about what i'm doing i get all the way up there and i start messing with something and i start to feel like i'm getting shorter and i'm like sliding down and the ladder starts sliding down the wall and the rug started sliding back so the whole ladder just went and fell on the ground and i grabbed onto a second story windowsill and i was hanging from the ladder because i put the bottom of the ladder on a rug and that rug slid so that's your safety time for the day don't ever put extension ladders on rugs this job it actually made me laugh my ass off because the first thing i did when i set my extension ladder up there was a welcome mat and i put it right on there and i looked at that thing and i'm like no i pulled that thing and threw it away and i was like i gotta talk about this in the video so here you go that was your safety time don't put extension ladders on rugs because they will slide so uh that's all i got hope you guys enjoyed that um make sure that you uh subscribe if you guys follow this channel if you watch all these videos and you actually like it help a brother out like it really matters to me that you guys actually like the videos and hit the little like thing that you subscribe to the channel make sure you're a channel member if you actually like have questions and you want to reach out to me and text me there's like a whole thing you know my phone number and i sit and text all you crazy people you have your weird questions let's go into the the questions let me see what some of these people have asked some people just want advice about like hey i'm moving to the area like do you know where i can find a place to work other people um just have some funny funny memes to send me that's the i love the most when people send me like silly ass pictures of stuff uh people ask about code questions all the time how do i wire a manual transfer switch did i wire this right they send like pictures and drawings that i can actually draw on their drawing and be like no i would run this like this but it's kind of cool so if you want to have that kind of interaction with me join the channel membership become a thousand volt member and you get your name on screen all these cool people get their names on screen um but yeah so uh hit the notification bell lets you know every time i have an episode practice exams on the website electrician.com all that jazz love you crazy people thank you so much for your constant support thanks for listening to me talk for uh forever uh love you people and i'll see you soon [Music] this can't use it and video [Music]

Channel: Electrician U

Views: 187,275

Keywords: electrician, electrical, electricity, dustin stelzer, electrician vlog, construction, commercial, residential, electrical vlog, electrical courses, electrician courses, electrical class, electrician class, electrician school, zinsco, breakers, power issues, losing power, grounding, bonding, conduit, emt, ac units, couplings, #10, driving, light fixtures, ladder, extension ladder, bathroom lighting, sconses

Id: 5TbVmMayCsI

Length: 17min 57sec (1077 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021