October 26, 2002
This old house.
A couple of days ago, I noticed that the low-voltage lights under our kitchen cabinets flickered every time one the drawers beneath the gas cook top were opened or closed. I popped out one of the drawers and sure enough, that’s where the contractor had installed the transformer for powering the lights. Figuring it was one of the low-voltage wires getting pinched or bent by the back of the drawer or the slide mount, I gently tugged the wires to see if I could determine the general vicinity of the problem. The lights flickered a few more times and then went out for good. What started as a quick fix before heading off to work had progressed into what would be a full-fledged, weekend seek and destroy mission.
This morning I pulled out both drawers under the cook top and surveyed the situation. It turns out that the low-voltage wire was intact (albeit about a metre longer than it needed to be and hanging limp inside of the cabinet). It was one of the 110 volt source wires feeding the transformer which had popped out of its marrette (that’s a wire nut for my American readers). This generally isn’t something you want to have next to an appliance which runs on natural gas. I flipped off the breaker, disconnected the remaining wires, and decided that while I was under the hood, I would go ahead and get the rest of the electrical bits in the area up to snuff. There’s another outlet box under the cabinet which the piezo ignitors and the exhaust fan for the stove are plugged into. The supply wire for this outlet box was currently running through the same hole in the floor that had been cut for the exhaust vent. That’s a bit sloppy for my taste. Likewise, I had previously installed a supplementary counter outlet but had never got around to connecting it into a circuit. This seemed like an opportune time to kill all the birds with one stone.
In order to rerun the supply wire for the under-cabinet outlet, I unscrewed the duplex receptacle and promptly had the hot wire from the supply cable snap off from the back of the outlet. It was around this point that I began to question our contractor’s insistence that the renovations he did a few years back didn’t specifically require an electrical permit. To wind up this tale, I ended up rewiring the entire circuit. I ran and secured the supply wires away from anything that could be a potential problem. I restripped all the wire ends and replaced all the marrettes. I pigtailed everything into a separate octagon box. Satisfied with the fact that at least one corner of the kitchen was up to code again, I flipped on the breaker. It was then I noticed that the under cabinet lights were on … but their switch was off. I’m back under the cabinets this afternoon.
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