#99 - Fuse Box Repair Made Simple

Fuse Box Repair Made Simple

11/3/06 (#99)

My wife called me at work, telling me that the lights had suddenly gone out on the main floor of the house---upstairs was fine, the basement was fully powered, but the ground floor was in the dark. She called hoping that I might shed some light on the subject, probably hopeful that on some past lazy Sunday afternoon I had lacked the ambition to change the channel and instead watched an episode of This Old House that covered the intricacies of the fuse box.

Normally I relish the opportunity to be a phone-in hero, to put minds at ease with a quick dispensation of some obscure factoid that saves the day---but normally, these queries involve the intricacies of Lionel Ritchie's lyrics or arcane references made in Owen Wilson movies. My collected knowledge of fuse boxes could easily be printed on a postage stamp. Even the two-cent size.

"Have you tried flicking the breakers back and forth?" I asked, hoping my wife had somehow regressed to a Dick-Van-Dyke-era Mary Tyler Moore-ish character whose idea of trouble-shooting was to make a cartoonish face and then call her husband at work. I was disappointed to learn that she had already tried jiggling the various switches.

"Maybe try them again," I recommended, feeling a need to contribute something, and since I had only one solution to every possible fuse box issue, my only option was to repeat the one thing I did know. She had already done them all, three times. (Three times? She was quickly becoming a fuse box repair specialist.) I pondered for a moment, hoping some obscure episode of Tool Time had lodged itself in my brain, then recalled the outcome of most of the "repairs" done on Tool Time---she needed to get the lights on, not blow up the stove. I sensed the opportunity for heroism was slipping away, and I resigned myself to failure.

Steph called the electric company, and it turned out to be an issue outside the house. A crew arrived with a cherry picker, a man was lifted to the top of the pole, and a few minutes later, the lights came on. One might think I would be jealous that someone else had snuck into the hero costume that I had hoped was fitted for me, but I could live with that---after all, this guy was restoring power to the refrigerator, where a fresh half-gallon of Dreyer's Caramel Delight ice cream awaited my return. He was my hero, too. And whatever he did up there on the pole, I doubt I could have done the same thing with repeated toggling of the breakers.

When I arrived home, all was well, except the clothes dryer didn't work. Steph had to go out, so I assured her that I would see what I could do about fixing it. (Not telling her that I had already dispensed the full breadth of my fuse box knowledge with my "jiggle the switches" recommendation earlier that day.) She went out, and I went down to the basement to have a look at the fuse box.

Popping the metal cover, I saw an efficient adhesive sheet on the inside of the cabinet door, numbered in the same pattern as the fuse box, perfect for finding and solving a fuse problem in a matter of seconds. Or would be perfect if it was used as it was designed---it was less effective in our case because only five of the 16 spaces had any writing, including the not-quite-reassuring posting of "Garage???" beside #14. Next to each of the switches was a small white label, an even more convenient spot to clearly identify each switch---here, 11 of the 16 spaces had writing in them, including three that were clearly marked, "dryer". (It seemed to have been written in a fourth spot as well, but like everything that had ever been written in that spot, it was lost to oblivion under the fevered scratchings of a ball point pen.)

I wondered how anyone who had ever owned the house had been able to survive with such horrible documentation. But seen from another angle, it was a fuse box perfectly designed for someone with exactly my level of electrical expertise: perfect documentation would mean only one fuse could solve the problem, but the vagueness of our breaker database justified the cover-my-bases tripping and resetting of every switch, an activity that at least offered the illusion of proactive intervention, though the only tangible result of my actions was to remotely restart my daughter's Little Mermaid DVD a few times.

As I stared at the box (unofficially known as "step 2" in my fuse box repair regimen), I noticed a slight bulge in the adhesive label on the back of the cabinet door, and was delighted to pull out three scraps of paper with hand written notes, crib sheets from previous outage adventures, numbers and scribbles that promised to reveal the actual powers of each switch. I was certain these brittle sheets contained the primer for decoding the fuse box puzzle, and flipped one to reveal the first clue:

7 = ???

This was a clue? Why was this sheet even deemed worthy of storage? It was opposite of information---it was the written evidence of acquiescence to a more formidable foe. I wondered why there wasn't a similar note for all of the other numbers---what was so special about not knowing what was on seven? I flipped the next document, penned in a scrawl I recognized as my own:

10=
11 =
12 = bedroom outlets, back hall, front porch

I was encouraged to have at least one of the fuses accurately identified, but the particulars of that documentation were suspect: The three regions attributed to this one switch were as distant from each other as any three areas of the house could be. The back hall and the front porch on a single fuse? Either my previous investigation had resulted in bad data, or my house had been wired by a madman.

The third note was the crucial piece---or would have been, had I extracted it 20 years ago, before age left the ink faded and barely legible. It was written in an ancient, grandmotherly cursive, full of graceful swoops and sharp angles, with a pen that was apparently sharper than a surgical scalpel. (My grandmother used to write her birthday cards to me in this same script, often leading me to believe she was wishing me a "Koppy Birdday" and that she "haped I libe the nnittens.") I scoured the note, looking for clues---there was the dryer, next to "5", disheartening because 5 was not one of the three switches in the box with "dryer" written next to it; there was nothing written next to 10 or 11, confirming the accurate uncertainty of my other note; next to 3, the only listing was "dishwasher"---an appliance we do not own, and considering our kitchen is smaller than a good walk-in closet, I don't know where the previous owner ever put it. We can't even find counter space for a juicer.

I examined the available materials and saw only one option---and began clicking everything off and on again. (When I flipped #9, I heard "Dad!" bellowed from upstairs---and quickly etched "TV/DVD outlet" onto the tag, optimistic that we would never move the television, lest "TV" one day overtake "dryer" as the item with the most redundant power supply in the house.) When I had completed flipping the two columns of switches, I went over to the dryer and pushed start---it obediently complied. Problem solved.

When my wife got home, she immediately asked for status on the dryer, and I nonchalantly responded that it was fixed. "How did you do it?" she asked, incredulous.

"I flipped all of the breakers again, and it worked."

"I did that, too. It didn't help when I did it."

I shrugged, unable to explain my success.

"Well...thanks," she said begrudgingly, her tone much less enthusiastic than it had been when she talked about PGE fixing the problem at the pole. I was no hero---I was the janitor who cleaned up the glass after the hero crashed through the window to save the day.

Oh well. As I sank the scoop into the Caramel Delight ice cream, I took solace in the fact that the world needs janitors as much as it needs heroes. I'll just keep my cape in the closet until Steph has a question about a Commodores lyric from 1979---suffice to say, there will be no calls to the electric company that day.

©2006 wpreagan