Episode: 3245
Title: HPR3245: ELECTRICITY
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3245/hpr3245.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:38:38

---

This is Haka Public Radio Episode 3245 for Friday 8th of January 2021.
Today's show is entitled Electricity.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 31 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, I talk about tips on electricity.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host operator.
This one is going to be kind of an ad hoc thing.
I was listening to some of the stuff that Klettu was talking about in about drives.
And maybe think about what I can do an episode on for while I'm sitting in traffic here.
I managed to go the wrong way off of it and I got off on the wrong way because I'm sitting in
copious amounts of traffic today. So I thought maybe I could use that time to do a quick
episode here in the car, so apologize for the audio. But what I wanted to talk about today was
kind of my diving into electricity and how it works to my understanding and how
sockets work and how like three-way switches work.
And how I was able to kind of troubleshoot all of that without actually knowing anything about
how electricity works or is supposed to work for like a better term. So the scenario usually
is you want to you want to swap out a switch, right? You have a switch either it's
cosmetically doesn't look right or it's fussy, you're really old and doesn't look right and you
want to swap a switch out. What I ended up doing is kind of giving up on the whole understanding
about white and black and ground and neutral and really understanding what that is and really
going just for using like an in almost meter. So get a cheaper ohms meter you don't have to get
like the $500 ones you can just get a regular one. I wouldn't use one of those little probes
that tells you if there's any electricity online or not like it's a little LED probe. I don't
know if they call them but you basically wave the wand around and it says oh this this outlet has
power those are good from the standpoint of you know not getting shocked potentially shocked
from something and I don't know what their limits are but if you can get a nice ohms meter some
of them will actually have that on there so you have like a little button on there and you can
use it to probe for probe for current electric current and it uses I guess I don't know some kind
of higher math to detect whether or not electricity is there. So I'm not here to tell you anything
about electricity. I'm telling I'm here to tell you how I kind of troubleshooted my own
electricity type of things and some of the things you should and shouldn't do if you're trying to
do this figure this out on your own without really knowing and understanding or reading anything.
So the first instance is swapping out a simple switch right and obviously what you can do is buy a
nice label printer a nice label printer for your circuit box or for your breaker box and this
takes a long time. My wife helped me with this and it took about I want to say two hours or more
to really label everything properly and even then you kind of have some guesses about where
stuff is and what stuff turns on and you sometimes just have to hit the main to to save yourself
some time and figuring out what's what. So you got a switch that you want to swap out or you want
to put in a dimmer or some fancy sensor base or occupancy sensor. So what you have to realize is on
older um older sockets or older switches or older dimmers you have to keep in mind that LEDs
and incandescent and then older switches and newer switches might not be compatible. So for
example I had a occupancy sensor and a that had a dimmer on it which a lot of them already have kind
of dimmers built into them but I had LED bulbs in there and the occupancy sensor was all kind of
glitched out because of the way the the the marrying I think it was the actual bulbs that were in there
operated differently and I think they fixed that here more recently with the LED bulbs they
act more like they act more friendly with these occupancy sensors and these dimmers and stuff but
the the bulbs that I had in the the fan when I replaced the fan bulbs to put in a new like occupancy
sensor um it would it would it would kind of glitch out so the occupancy sensor would think that it
was off or the light was off because of the way the frequencies and LED works in the timing so
for example it would turn off and then somehow turn itself back on because of the way the bulb was
or something some weird marrying between the electricity so I don't know what the research is
around it how to figure it out but just be mindful that things might get weird when you work with LEDs
and dimmers and occupancy sensors and sensors and LED bulbs because they're not incandescent bulbs
and they're not always on or always off they're you know the LED is constantly flickering on and off
and things get off litchy when you bring in that into it so um after swapping out the bulbs
to I guess different LED bulbs I didn't have any problems and I don't remember what I googled
to to to get um the right kind of bulbs in there that would work with the occupancy sensor
I hope that was one little thing and then obviously with with the reader um if you use one of the
you know there's electricity around me type of uh probes you don't know what the voltage is
on that line so if you're trying to do troubleshooting and you're you're like something's not
turning on and you're waving the one I was like oh there's power there but it's not turning on
what's a problem I don't understand and the reason you need a meter and the proper meter to read
the voltage is sometimes there might be voltage leaking onto that line and giving you a fault
sense of of of of of of of of of of of of a voltage so for example um I've been told that there's
there's instances where our motors will kind of feed back um energy or leak energy back into the
line to further down the line so for example maybe you have like an old face unit or something
like that some kind of motor that um is litched out or whatever and it can feed it can feed power
back into the line and give you the fault sense that that line is hot from the the inside and when
I say the the the the in route instead of the x the the the the the the the lead or the tail
what do they call it the um anyway so there's a term for um down the leg on the on the on the
on the receiving leg so you kind of had the the receiving leg where the power you know come is
supposed to be coming in and then you have the leg that goes out to further down the line to
another switch or another outlet or whatever now that that can cough up energy back in and
calls you problem so I'll give you another troubleshooting example where um we were in our attic
and the attic lights didn't work and I I couldn't figure it out I swapped the bowl I figured it was
just the bowl over the switch you know the socket so I swapped the socket out because it's old
and rested I swapped the socket out plugged in a brand new light and it still didn't work still
didn't work finally took the meter to it and it was reading like you know 30 volts or something
stupid like it should be you know the 120 year or 220 or 240 right so I knew something was wrong
and I shouldn't see you know 30 rolled to 60 volts or anything like that on the line it should
be you know 120 or nothing um so it is usually a little higher like 124 sometimes even
in 126 I've seen as like normal furred lack of a better term um and what it ended up being is there
was a smoke detector that was an old smoke detector on the wall and on that leg and it was like
shorting out or doing whatever and kind of leaking uh losing power when it got down to the
got down to the attic so you have to understand that this stuff is most of the time plugged in
series and it it's probably old or misconfigured or you know done wrong or over time you know
something gets fizzles out and something glitches out and so you need to look for that 120
it starts troubleshooting so what I had to do is I had an ohms meter and I was reading the voltage
and I was trying to find where the leak was and what you can do is you can get like a really long
cable and the easiest way to do this is go to the store and buy some really cheap speaker wire
you don't want to buy like you know one gauge and you also don't want to buy like a tiny really
thin gauge because you put it on that 120 and it's going to just like fizzle away and explode
and catch fire so you obviously want to buy a big enough gauge for the for the 120 and I think
I want to say 12 and 14 13 something like that is the normal gauge for like um light
synth stuff um and don't quote me on any of this I'm not electrician at all but I want to say
it's like 13 or 12 or 14 is like the safe gauge to use um which is your normal you know thicker
speaker wire you can always be safe so you get this long speaker wire and you get you a couple
of alligator clips and you put alligator clips at both ends and that will allow you to kind of trace
the connectivity to from one place to another and it looks a little childish but it ends up working
for me to to figure out okay well there's a connection here and this is supposed to be this
ground is supposed to go to this thing over here um to troubleshoot where the connectivity issues
are or if you're not getting power you can use that uh like a long speaker wire cable to kind of
do some troubleshooting as far as connectivity goes um another thing you could do is purchase a
a tolem generator and um you you're probably familiar with how they work you attach
alligator clips to a thing and you usually come with nine volt batteries you want to be sure to
unplug all those batteries when they're done because you'll end up frying your uh potentially
frying your um uh your uh your your um tone generator so always when you ever if you ever get a nice
one get a nice one get a nice one a decent one um and and and and make sure you take the batteries
out because you don't want you don't want uh batteries leaking out inside of there and making a big
mess and screwing up your thing when you're going to use it i usually keep the batteries in some
nine volt good nine volt batteries in with the unit and uh all how flat flat head screwdriver and
put take it apart put together so anyways you put this probe on one end that generates a tone
and then you wave the wand around to try to find the other end of where the leg is so if you're
looking for the the upstream you know the the the the receiving leg you can fuss around and
kind of realize oh it's going up so they see they're going upstairs or going up to and you know
to a a light socket and kind of troubleshoot it that way and and the main thing is obviously is
realize that you know if you go start monkeying around and touching wires the safest thing you can
possibly do is just check the probe and make sure before you touch any wires that you know that's
that you're not going to ground yourself out and whatever um so with that with that with the uh
the smoke detector issue um once I took the I shorted out the the line just to test and you can buy
little screw caps obviously everybody probably has a thousand of them the the terminator things where
you screw the little piece of plastic dilly head on the tank to terminate um to twist two wires
together and you terminate them um so you can you can you can have usually feed by like a lamp or
a fan or something you get two or three of those and you collect them over time um but I
terminated with that and then I was able to tell that now the attic was getting the proper 120
bolts that it that it needed um and then I went from there and got some nice LED things and
and swapped them out you can actually get all kinds of stuff for that you can get like an occupancy
bulb which has like a little sensor on it um you can plug in line with uh with a bulb so it's like
uh there's several ways to do you can just get a bulb or I think you can get or the option is
you can get like an occupancy sensor socket that kind of screws into the socket that's the occupancy
sensor and then you screw up whatever bulb you want to into that and then you have your occupancy
just using no switches or anything like that um that was another that's another instance of
kind of troubleshooting electricity here recently um I still haven't quite figured out the
three-way switch stuff usually I just look at the instructions that came with whatever replacement
three-way switch and figuring out where the red red wire is supposed to go um I can't speak much
to that because usually it's kind of a trial and error thing depending on however they want you to
have the leads to come into the to the three-way switch um and and and I have seen at least one
instance where um wires came in and they weren't wired the right way they were using like a ground to
do um another leg so whatever wire is supposed to be you know hot it's supposed to be don't go by
that you want to use the meter again to make sure that the wire that's hot is supposed to be hot
and the wire that's grounded is supposed to be ground what they'll do sometimes is they'll break the um
instead of breaking the right line instead of uh making the switch for so for example you're
turning the off switch they'll hook the switch up to the actual ground instead of the live wire so
the light turns off because it's missing the neutral it's not it's it's it's missing the power
so what will happen is it you turn off the light and you think that there's no power going to the
light but in fact that the light actually has power going to it and they've just swapped the switch
out to to actually just lose the the neutral wire so that that that's one instance where you kind
of have to be careful um working on lights and stuff okay you turn the light off you think you're
good you need to make sure that there's not actually power still going to the light because of the
way they jury rigged something or just screwed up the switch um i'll give you an example of one
way of not to play with with electricity is um i had a garage door opener i was trying to troubleshoot
and for whatever reason i think um oh the the contacts on the socket had oxidized so um the
oxidation you know kicks in around you know bad weather or weather conditions usually or just
um it's usually moisture in the air that will cause oxidation on the contacts usually it's on the
the hot side in the middle that will give you um issues so it this socket for the garage door
that had a light on it wasn't working because if you look i look down in there i could see that
there's a oxidation in it so me stupid me i get up on a a foot ladder and i have a knife to
scrape off the oxidation on the um on the outlet and i do this live like an idiot um instead of
because i'm i'm going back and forth i'm troubleshooting i'm trying to figure out what's going on
i had the meter out i had the the the the the the wire to live hot and i'm trying to make sure
you know that that that indeed is the problem is it is the oxidation so i troubleshoot it i
realized that the oxidation is because of the socket and the the light socket in the back is all
oxidated um if you don't have this by some it's a life saver it's called contact cleaner
and you can buy all kinds of expensive kind um i usually buy the the gold whatever some or other
fancy stuff that has like a lubricant in it um and it's usually safe to put on most electronics
you want to be clear to not put it on like spray and LCD because it will kind of jack it up for a while
and sometimes permanently damage your your LCD screens um so you want to be it's like an iris
all basically so you want to be careful spraying that stuff fun LCDs um i've seen it damage
that's about it really um i've seen it just make stuff all greasy and gross but what it'll do
is it'll eat away at that oxidation and allow you to kind of scrape off whatever
oxidation crap is on there works great for like you know you leave something plugged in
you leave the batteries in something too long right you spray it let it sit for a while maybe
spray it again depending on how bad it is let it sit for a while and then you want to take like uh
if you have like a little um dremel tool or a metal brush um you can brush it off and we're
headed with a dremel tool and kind of buff out uh buff out that stuff um you obviously want to use um
when you're doing this if you're using the dremel tool um you want to use uh no goggles
because you'll scrape um when you scrape off the stuff oxidation off of like a remote or whatever
usually happens with like a tv remote or a weaver mode or something that you haven't used in a long time
um you'll you'll have little flex of the battery acid flicking off all over the place and you
don't want that going in your eyes because that's not fun um i didn't get it in my eyes but
i had some flick off into my face once and i said you know what this would probably be a good idea
to be wearing some safety glasses when i'm you know um you know have chunks of uh battery acid
or going everywhere um so you want to be cognizant of that but anyways i'm sitting on this uh
this eight foot letter with a knife um scraping the hot end of a light socket i'm i'm being very
careful not to you know short myself out with the and it's also a metal knife believe it or not
um it's a it's a metal knife that i'm scraping the context with all metal you know that the handle
is metal and everything um so i'm not thinking that part all the way through i'm sitting on a
foot ladder and i was okay until um my elbow had touched the ground of the um um because the
the the the the the ladder i was working was a fiberglass ladder and as you know and would assume
um the fiberglass isn't isn't conductive and also a lot of your little ladders will have
little rubber feet on the plastic feet on the bottom to to keep you from being grounded and that's
not that's not a security feature that's a that's a just uh whatever so i wasn't actually grounded
at the time when i was up there so the whole time i'm holding onto this metal knife and scraping
away at the oxidation i'm basically waiting to be grounded on a on a 120 on a 120 uh drop
so i'm sitting there scraping scraping away scraping away and then my elbow hits the railing
uh the guide railing for the um for the uh for the garage and my elbow hits that and i get
grounded out and get a nice nice clean nice clean shock because i'm holding onto a uh i'm holding
on to a metal a metal knife on an eight foot ladder and then my elbow hits a nice big piece of
grounded metal and and shocks me pretty good on on it it was actually a bolt on the uh thing so
it was like kind of just sticking out down the very tip and i got a nice nice jolt um and that was
just basic troubleshooting stuff and basic kind of safety deal um due to diligence you know
before you start messing with something even if it's live be like do i really need to be working
on this live can i do this without working on it live um you know unless you're staying in a bucket
of water it's not really gonna make make or break your day but at the end at the end of the day
nobody wants to get shocked and it's not any fun so um um just try to realize if you're working on
live wires when you're working on them make sure do i need to be working on this live or am i just too
lazy to go turn off the circuit breaker or turn off the switch or whatever um i see i'm trying to
think of the the the one i'm gonna be talking about recently and and and and was kind of more
frustrating was um we had to replace we're getting some walls taken down in our house we had to
replace all of the um outlets a lot of the outlets in the rooms that they're working in because
they need to be the new kid safety ones and i'll tell you these new ones are like house little plastic
they're basically kid safer whatever so they have these little plastic doors on them and i think
the idea is that you have to plug it in both at the plug plug in both both slots at the hot and
the the the you have to plug in both at the same time for the thing to let you pass the plastic
gate so the idea being that if the kid or whoever has a piece of metal and they shove it into the hot
end it's not going to open without something also being shoved in the other end so what what ends
up happening is that when you're trying to do probing and stuff i wasn't able to successfully
easily check whether or not there was power going to these new fancy um they weren't the GFI ones
they're just new fancy outlets i don't know what they call them but they're they're frustrating um
so anyways we get these fancy outlets we we start to swap them out and some of them are
have an extra um an extra leg off them and some of them were like we're wonky like like one the top
side where like you have the the socket the first socket up top and then the the bottom socket
down low and some of them had like you know the neutral the you know like the neutral at the top
and then like the the hot at the bottom or like it was weird they would be all kind of swapped around
um but after doing some troubleshooting and trying to figure out where each wire goes and where
the power is coming from and just like taking it straight like just taking the wire straight and
being like okay this this is always this wire using the tracing this wire obviously goes outside
to the socket that looks all jacked up i'm going to replace this socket outside and then figure out
where it goes and where its power is coming from and just kind of taking it just step by step um
i kind of started to realize how the switches were were put together and how everything is connected
and i don't know if it was because of when i was troubleshooting um sticking the probes in these
new fancy outlets i was i wasn't sometimes i would get like 18 volts and it was all weird and was
a consistent and i'm like trying to figure out what's going on and of course i touched the wires and
i get the the the 120 just fine so it's there's something weird about these new fancy plastic um you
know ones that you have to use when you're doing work now they make you switch out to these new
outlets that are just frustrating um it's a bit like the gas cans that they make you use now
that like the safety gas cans where you end up spilling gasoline all over the place which is
somehow safer than just having a gas can that will actually pour gas out of um so the new gas
cans have this you know this fancy little safety switch thing and then you have to like
burp it and like like because if you don't burp it and get some of the air out before you close it
and the summertime your gas can expands into a giant thing and you know looks like it's about to
explode um but anyways it's a bit like that it's a little frustrating the safety stuff trying to
make its way into your house but anyways um after kind of just removing the outlets
on the problem areas i had um i was able to trace the wires figure out where the power is coming from
here figure out where most of the legs were going to you know maybe they go to an outlet and then
to a light outside um checking to make sure that you know the current's good the connections good
and then um i think on these newer outlets maybe maybe it was just the way i was using the probes
and i couldn't get the probe in right and maybe it was fine the whole time or maybe these new
outlets have some kind of fancy you know one way power thing because there was a sticker on the
bottom that said hey if you're gonna if you're gonna um do more than one leg off of this
if you're gonna do the the the leg the the receiving electricity has to be on the top surrogate
and the bottom is supposed to be for the outbound or the the leg and the the far the outbound leg
so once i once i said okay well you you i don't know if it's just kosher to do it that way or
that's the way it has to be done with these with these outlets um i put the input you know the power
in at the top the top socket and i put the power out at the bottom socket and then there was
another leg going to another outlet that was like on the other side of the wall and once i did
that everything worked fine and what i realized then is that okay i need to do better probing
and the idea that i came up with is you can buy it like really anywhere you can buy the replacement
sockets for like your vacuum cleaner so like if you pull your vacuum cleaner core too hard and the
sock you know the thing comes straight um you can buy a replacement socket and that's what i'm
planning to use next time when i'm trying to troubleshoot these stupid new outlets um and put some
nice you know set it up just so where i can shove the probes in there and it actually gives me power
to test the the socket um it might be one step extra but i don't have to like i felt like when i
was trying to probe the the new sockets these fancy new kit safe sockets you have to like
jury rig the probe around and like wave the probe around to try to get the power and it's just like
it didn't feel comfortable you know taking the probe and just yaming around inside of the socket
to try to find where the hell the power is coming from they're going to so i'll probably be doing
that next time um let's see what else um try to think of some other tips for like electricity
and and 120 type of stuff um and and oftentimes you know i've we you try to troubleshoot something
and you can't figure out what's going on um sometimes i'll just hit the main because i don't really
feel like trying to figure out how how it's all wired together and of course that resets all your
clocks and all that shit but at the end of the day if you're trying to make sure that there's no
power to something really the best thing to do is just hit the main if that's not going to be too
big of a deal breaker for you um which which is what i did at one point time because there were
multiple people working on multiple outlets and multiple sides of the house and i was like is
this hot is this not hot is i don't know i was testing it anyways like you know what i'm just
gonna hit the main and everybody can do whatever the hell they want and not have to worry about being
shocked in in theory um sometimes you do that sometimes you have instances where you know you're
getting power but you don't know where it's coming from in one way to kind of troubleshoot that is
to start um uh systematically turning off each uh each circuit until you figure out which one
is giving you the power so for example you're on a circuit that's not supposed to be powered but
yet you're getting voltage on the line to figure out where that voltage is coming from you can do
some troubleshooting by dropping out each uh each circuit um more number of circuits at a time
and be like okay well this bottom half of the of the of the circuit breaker it's not anywhere here
because i still see voltage all right well i'm gonna flip the whole bottom half back on and flip
the top half oh looks like the voltage has gone away okay i'm gonna flip top of the half of the top
half back on okay well it looks like i've got voltage now so it's got to be one of these four
and you can mirror it narrow it down a lot quicker instead of having to like go one by one
um so that that's one way to kind of troubleshoot you know once you figure out what circuit it's on
and if you've labeled it properly you give you give you an idea of where to start um what i found out
is these outdoor at least in our instances like a 30 year old house the outdoor sockets seem to be
kind of weird uh weird uh in there in there in their in their setup i think we had um an outdoor
socket going downstairs and upstairs um and then like in the bathroom or something i don't really
know how it was set up but it was it it was i think the outdoor sockets seemed a little weird
in that regard because i don't know if they have to be on their own circuit or something like that
but whatever i whenever i end up trying to figure out the outdoor outlets or outdoor sockets
it's always weird to figure out what they're connected to because um they have to be on like a
GFI circuit or something like that i think i don't know how it works but the idea is like you know
your kitchen and your bathrooms are supposed to have those fancy uh GFI uh sockets that have like
the test button so if something happens they'll short out um so it's it's it's a little crazy right
you got you got your hair dryer your hair dryer most some of some of your hair dryers have a little
breaker on them and then from there you got the GFI right so that's another breaker and then you
have the actual breaker at the breaker box so we know when when i'm using my hair dryer in the
bathroom downstairs there's three breakers in between me and the actual power that's going to that
to that that circuit breaker or that circuit um so if anything happens but but in that wine
across the three places uh i'm going to be just for perfectly fine um so that that's something to
keep in mind too is that these things pop um circuit breaker pop and in kind of troubleshooting
that is another another fun thing to do um i think that's pretty much it um i can't think of any other
kind of hints or tips or electricity and again like i'm sure there's people listening to this
and like cringing and being like this guy is no clue what has to what he's doing um but i do know
you know hot is hot and and ground is ground and once you kind of figure out you know you separate all
the wires and figure out where the power is coming from and where the legs are going it doesn't really
matter if you know what you're doing you just know that okay this this has to come in and this has
to give me power and then this power has to be daisy chained down the line to somewhere else
um whether or not i know where that is sometimes i don't um but it it's just a matter of like
you know figuring out where the power is where it's going and where you're missing voltage and where
you know stuff is leaking around and just basic troubleshooting of of of electricity is
is how i'm able to kind of figure stuff out at the end of the day um anyways um good time to be safe
you
you've been listening to hecka public radio at hecka public radio dot org
we are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday
today's show like all our shows was contributed by an hbr listener like yourself
if you ever thought of recording a podcast then click on our contributing to find out how easy
it really is hecka public radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the infonomican computer club
and it's part of the binary revolution at binrev.com if you have comments on today's show please
email the host directly leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself
unless otherwise status today's show is released on the creative comments
attribution share a light 3.0 license