I’ve got this plumbing project in my basement, that I’ve been working at for what seems like about a year now.

It started with my wife finding a leaky pipe. The leak was (is) at a copper tee, where a 3/4″ line branches out to 2 1/2″ lines. It was (is) leaking at a rate of a drop every 5 minutes or so. I put a bucket under it. This was last spring or so. The bucket is still there.

One of the 1/2″ branches goes to an outside sillcock. The original sillcock was unoperational (frozen up, clogged, whatever). So I decided, well, I need to take this all apart anyhow, so I might as well replace the sillcock. So I cut the branch, capped it near the tee, and took out the sillcock and all the old plumbing going to it. Then I routed new copper pipe back to the tee. That was last summer. Over the next couple months, I sweated most of the fittings along the new line. I’m not what you would call an expert at sweating copper, particularly where it comes to valves. Now, I’m at the point where I need to test my new branch for leaks, replace the tee, and connect everything back up. I’m not looking forward to it, so I’m putting it off.

I’m thinking about pressure testing the new branch to find leaks. Here’s the current plan.

1. Take a short length of pipe, and sweat a female adapter onto one end
2. Screw a quick-connect air coupling into the adapter
3. Attach the other end to my branch using a compression coupling
4. Attach air compressor, close all valves, crank up to 30PSI or so
5. Leave it that way for awhile and see if it holds the pressure.

I figure if I use a compression fitting, that will allow me to reuse this contraption on other projects.

Once I’m satisfied the branch is leak-free, I can hook it up to the live plumbing, which is what I’m really not looking forward to. For some reason, I find plumbing projects like this infinitely more daunting than electrical projects. See, with an electrical project, if I hit a snag I can usually get away with leaving a branch circuit off for a day or two. Just plug stuff into different outlets, run some extension cords, whatever. This is not the case with plumbing. There is absolutely no way I’m getting away with leaving the water shut off for a day or two. If I screw up, I’m really screwed, so to speak. No, the job needs to get done right, the first time. And anyone who’s ever done plumbing knows that there are always “gotchas” lurking around the corner, waiting to spring on you after you’ve shut off the main and cut all the pipes apart. Then, when you get everything back together, you have to hope that you got everything right and nothing leaks. To me, plumbing has always seemed like more of a crap-shoot than electrical work. This is improving somewhat as I get more experience, but I’m still dreadding this project.

More (maybe a couple years) later when I get back to this project..

Subject says it all! I finished the wiring up today, installed the fan control, and replaced an outlet while I was at it. All my extra wiring turned out to be worth the effort — there’s absolutely no way I would have gotten the fan control in the wall box with all the extra wires there. It’s enough of a challenge just getting these controls in the box with only one wire. Which brings me to my obligatory gripe of the day. These fan controls (Lutron Skylark model) are great. They seem well-made and reliable. But I hate installing them. They’re so deep that they barely fit in a standard-depth wall box. And on top of that, they have pigtails, and you have to fit three wirenuts (four if you’re attaching the ground) in the box, in addition to the control. This makes them very bad for retrofit work, particularly in older houses where the boxes tend to be smaller. If there’s more than one cable going into your wall box, you can pretty much forget it. It’d be much nicer if these controls could be backwired (stick wire in hole, tighten screw), to eliminate the need for wirenut splices. Maybe Lutron will eventually figure this out. Unfortunately it’ll be too late to help me out.

Anyhow, the only thing left now is to remount the fan and clean up all the plaster chunks, insulation and other crap that fell out of the hole in the ceiling. I’d say we can pretty much stick a fork in this project.

I spent the afternoon in the attic today, and got the lion’s share of the wiring done for the fan project. Last week I fished the wire from the basement to the attic. It was pretty straightforward. Some medium-duty nylon rope was the ticket. I dropped it down into the stud cavity from the attic, went into the basement, poked up a hooked piece of stiff wire, snagged the rope, and pulled it through. Then I used the rope to pull the romex up from the basement into the attic. The two keys to doing this successfully are:

1. Electrical tape; and
2. A helper.

Just tape the romex to the end of the rope with plenty of electrical tape, go up to the attic, and have your helper feed the cable up from the basement while you pull it up. This can be done by yourself, but you’ll get lots of exercise running upstairs and downstairs to unkink the romex.

The first job today was to get the old box and brace out of the ceiling to make room for the new fan-approved brace and box. Every time I do this, I’m reminded of how much I hate those metal ceiling box braces that nail to the underside of the joists. There’s no way to get them all the way out without tearing up the ceiling. Plus, the weight of the fixture tends to pull the nails loose over time, which is not good news for the ceiling, or for the person standing under the fixture when it eventually comes crashing down.

The trick to getting these out is to cut them, removing the center part and leaving the ends nailed to the joists. I’ve found that the best tool for this is a Dremel rotary tool with a cutoff wheel. I’ve used a hacksaw, and it’s laborious (the bars are actually pretty thick metal) and the sawing action can damage the ceiling (and your knuckles). The Dremel is not perfect (if you breathe wrong on the cutoff wheels, they break), but believe me, it is far superior to sawing.

This bar came out easier than others I’ve done. Once I cut one side, the other side just swung out of the way (because, of course, the nails had pulled loose).

The actual wiring was complicated but straightforward. There were a lot of wires in the old box (it fed two different downstream branches). Rather than put everything back into the fixture box, I mounted a second junction box, wired everything up to that, and ran a single 12/3 cable to the fixture box carrying two switched hots (lights and fan) and neutral. This makes for a neater job and lets me use a larger box for all of my splices.

Just a couple parting tips for doing this kind of work:

1. Invest in a pair of knee pads (or “kneelers”). Your knees will thank you for it.
2. If your house has lots of BX wiring like mine, invest $25 or so for a good quality rotary BX cutter. It’s absolutely worth its weight in gold, which you’ll appreciate if you’ve ever tried to cut BX with a hacksaw.

Almost done now, just need to wire up the fan control, route the wire in the basement, and remount the fan.

I got kinda lazy yesterday, and didn’t get too much done on the bedroom fan wiring project. But, I did get one step closer to running a new wire from the basement to the attic. I got holes drilled in the top and bottom plates, and verified that both holes hit the same stud cavity. Fishing the wire should be pretty easy at this point.

Rules of thumb for anyone who wants to attempt this…

1. Ensure that you own a ranch house. 🙂
2. Tools of the trade: tape measure, stud finder, drill, 1/8″ x 12″ feeler bit, 5/8″ spade bit, flashlight.
3. Find reference points in the basement and attic so that you can (somewhat accurately) pinpoint where to drill. Examples are: pipe penetrations, wire penetrations, ducts, etc.
4. Locate the wall studs, and pick your drilling spots so that you don’t hit the top (or bottom) of a vertical wall stud.
5. Measure, measure, measure! Can’t stress this enough.
6. Drill a pilot hole first to make sure you hit an open stud cavity. I use a 1/8″ x 12″ bit for this. After drilling, leave the bit in the hole. Then go upstairs/downstairs and make sure the bit is not sticking through the ceiling/floor!
7. Assuming everything looks good, use a 5/8″ spade bit to enlarge the hole. When drilling downwards from the attic, make sure the bit is TIGHT in the chuck.
8. Once you have drilled both holes, put a flashlight over the hole in the attic. Adjust the light for a focused (not diffuse) beam. Go down to the basement. Turn the lights off, look up into the hole, and make sure you can see the beam.

Next: Let’s fish some wire..

So, I’m doing a bit of rewiring in our spare bedroom, soon to become my 3-year-old’s new room. The previous owners put up a ceiling fan. Problem is, they didn’t bother to install an approved box. It’s one of those lovely nail-to-the-underside-of-the-studs metal bar jobbies. Rather than sit around twiddling my thumbs until the fan comes crashing down, I’m putting a new box in with a proper brace. Along the way, I’m replacing the wall switch, a fan/light control that has (putting it nicely) seen better days.

Well, nothing is ever that easy. The new fan control is slightly deeper than the old one. The power feeds through the wall box. There are 3 cables coming into the box: A 14-2 BX feed, a 14-3 BX carrying switched, unswitched and neutral to the ceiling box, and a 14-2 romex that someone added at a later date, to carry switched power to the fan (separate from the lights). So, we’ve got 3 cables and a grand total of 5 wirenuts (3 for the switch, 1 for neutral, and 1 to cap off the unused wire in the romex cable). Short story: I can’t fit everything in the box with the deeper switch.

I want to use this switch. I’ve got 2 other identical ones elsewhere in the house. So, looks like I need to do some rewiring.

I suppose I could replace the box. Nothing I haven’t done before. But, these boxes are holy hell to get out of the wall, without destroying the wall (plaster over gypsum board, or “rock lath” as it was called back in the day). No, I think I’ll rewire things and take the wall box out of the circuit, and make it a simple switch loop. Then I can cut it down to a single 14/3 cable going to the box, with a hot and two switched lines, 1 for the fan and 1 for the lights. Then it’ll fit.

So, I’ll just find a wire in the attic that’s ahead of the switch box in the circuit, cut it, and route it directly to the ceiling box, right? Sure, in theory. Problem is, there are no wires in the attic that are ahead of the switch box. The switch box IS the feed from the basement to the attic. Time for plan B. Looks like I’ll need to run a new wire from the basement to the attic. This will require me to break out my wire fishing skills. Now, having wired my own security system, I’ve done my share of fishing. However I’ve never run a wire straight from the basement, through a stud cavity, and into the attic (this is a rancher, BTW. Unfinished attic on top, drop-ceiling basement on bottom. If you’re into wiring, ranchers rock). Seems like it should be easy in theory. I guess I’ll find out. This should be fun! More later.