A Drier Dryer part II

I will add some pictures later.
So the first step (other than buying the fan) is to install an outlet up in the attic. Now Kim was not happy about me working with electricity. So I asked my neighbor Wes Bodily to drop by and help. He certainly knew his stuff. But knowing doesn’t mean that mistakes won’t be made. It just means that reasonable efforts will be made not to kill anyone. Wes came over and the first thing we did was to look at what we had in the attic. He looked at the wires running all over the place and said that I needed to get a handle on what all the wires were doing. We followed the wires for awhile and looked at the open connection box. He did not like it, but it did not stop him from moving on. So Wes went over to his house and grabbed some electrical stuff. I got to look at some of the stuff he was working on. He is doing a lot. He grabbed his electrical meter and some scraps of wire, wirenuts, and his cool toolbelt and off we went again. I hit the breaker on the house and went up to the attic. He decided to work from the juntion box that was open. He cut a lot of the extra wire tightening everything up. He then simply ran another wire from the junction box to an outlet box he had attached to one of the 2×4’s close by. He moved fairly quickly stripping the wire and attaching them with wire nuts. He then shoved the new wires coming out of the junction box into the back of the new outlet. I ran down stairs and popped the breakers back in place. He said he had power in the outlet. I then went around turning off the lights and when I hit the porch light he shouted that the outlet had lost power. He had attached it to the wire coming off that switch. His assumption was that one of the wires coming into the junction box was hot. Now the choice was to look for a possible hot wire or looking some where else. We fished around and found what seemed to be a wire coming straight from the breaker box and disappearing down into the wall. It seemed to be where the outlet for the fridge and washing machine came out of the wall. There were two holes in the floor and the wire was running down into one of them. He took the wire he had brought over and ran it into the other hole. We then went downstairs and pulled the outlet out from the wall. (We had the electricity off again at this point) The outlet box was installed before the walls were put in place. It was just nailed into the stud. Wes struggled ripping it away from the stud, but when he did, he found the wire we had shoved into the other hole dangling right behind the box. He found out that the outlet was a 15 Amp outlet and the wires were 20 Amp. Without knowing what the circuit breaker was the assumption was that the outlet would catch fire before the wires and should be replaced. Since the box we used upstairs in the attic was made for attaching to drywall I ran upstairs and grabbed that box. Wes had to attach the wires to the side of the outlet rather than putting it in holes because the 20 Amp wires wouldn’t fit. With that put back together we ran upstairs ran the wire to the new outlet and we were done. We tested one more time and everything seemed to be in order. My first lesson in electricity. I don’t know what I didn’t learn because we didn’t make that mistake, but I did learn a few things. The next step will be to re-route the dryer ventilation pipe. I am still working on patching the holes and I only have 2 weeks.

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