Always Check Things Out for Yourself

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jmellc

Senior Member
Location
Durham, NC
Occupation
Facility Maintenance Tech. Licensed Electrician
One day I will not have to keep learning this lesson. I have had several jobs over the years to get very complicated because I took what the customer told me as fact.

This week I went to a student center at one of our local universities. Kitchen had a wall of receptacles out. Person in charge showed me the panel, far corner of building & said no breakers had tripped. Breakers 31, 33 and 35 were marked "kitchen counter", etc. 31 controlled the working receps & 33, 35 appeared to do nothing. I asked about other panels. He said there was 1 upstairs that fed nothing downstairs. I went there for good measure and found nothing. Found a couple of panels in the basement that only fed equipment there.

Kitchen had been a renovation, I could tell that. On opposite wall, I found boxes in cabinets, backs of cabinets cut out around them. Hard pipe out of floor, NM from boxes to receptacles. A few boxes had dead ended wires in them, so several changes over the years. An island had a box stubbed from floor & feeding 2 recepts there. So I began looking for hidden boxes on counter in question. Cut cabinet backs in several places, found nothing but the NM's from box to box. Found a hard pipe feeding down from clg with a black & red, only red hooked up, black dead ended. Asked director again about any other panels. "No there are no more". So I got out the fox & hound and tried getting signal at any panel. No luck. Finally found a ceiling hatch about 50 feet away. Fun crawl over a plaster ceiling on walk boards. Found conduit & traced it back TO A SECOND PANEL UPSTAIRS. I showed it to the guy and he was surprised. It was then he also told me there was also a kitchen upstairs. Then it was only a matter of replacing recepts with GFCI's and splitting circuits. Don't know why anyone set it up with just 1 when they had 2 available.

At any rate, misinformation turned a half day job into a day and a half. Never take someone's word for anything when the clues found tell a different story. I should have searched the building room by room for other panels. I was expecting to find buried receptacles that were burned out. I have seen that before.

The people running the building had bought it a few years ago from another group so did not fully know the history. Again, I should have looked for myself. I have also had maintenance men tell me they knew no one else had been working on this or that, then found out someone had. False information leads to a lot of wild goose chases.
 
I learned not to take what customers say as fact years ago when I owned a business repairing automotive electrical systems.

Actually, I don't even take their driving directions as fact and insist on an address. The stories I could tell as a result of not sticking to the aforementioned requirements.
 
Junior engineers are worse. The first thing they want is to blurt out their pet theory. I'll appreciate their input, but later! I need to work the problem from the outside in. I can't afford to get narrow focus too soon. Their pet theory and list-of-things-that-have-already-been-tried were obviously wrong or I wouldn't be here. When they start "I think it's ..." I stop them. Dont' tell me yet. I don't want to know.

If the junior engineer or technician think the symptoms have a common cause then the probably have multiple sources. If the JE thinks there are multiple sources then there is probably a common cause.

They'll always tell you that it's not the software. They 'checked the software.' We'll, sorry to tell them, it's always the software.

And, as to that list-of-things-that-have-already-been-tried, I'm going to do them again cause you missed something.
 
K8MHZ said:
...

Actually, I don't even take their driving directions as fact and insist on an address. ....
Click to expand...

It's right down there where the thingamajig used to be; surely you know where that is (was).

Those people burn me up. It's always some abstract planner who likes cute things instead of things that work. And that's why none of their stuff ever works.

When people start giving directions like that I just remove the phone from my ear for 10 seconds, then come back "Sorry, what did you say the address is?"
 
Actually, I don't even take their driving directions as fact and insist on an address. The stories I could tell as a result of not sticking to the aforementioned requirements.[/QUOTE]

I fully agree with that too but do listen if they are trying to tell you details. When wife & I 1st married, we moved to a Leon St address in Durham, NC. Everyone in Durham knows Leon St but very few people know there was about a 4 block extension of it, cut off by a park. It was hard to find and the only people who knew of it lived within a few blocks. I tried to tell pizza clerks and others and they all said "yes we know Leon St." and hung up. 2 hours later the driver calls that he never could find it. THEN I could tell the situation. I had been a pizza driver myself and knew someone would get lost. I had people over who had lived within a mile of us for 30 years and never knew about that little section of the street. One of the few smart things our city gov ever did was rename that piece of street during a renaming project a few years later.
 
I hope you got paid for for 1.5 days.

I have had customers tell me we don't have another panel, $800 later come to find out there was another panel with a tripped circuit breaker.

"you mean all we could have done is reset the breaker?"
"Yes Sir, that is why I asked all the questions and you assured me that there was no secondary panel"
 
edward said:
I hope you got paid for for 1.5 days.

I have had customers tell me we don't have another panel, $800 later come to find out there was another panel with a tripped circuit breaker.

"you mean all we could have done is reset the breaker?"
"Yes Sir, that is why I asked all the questions and you assured me that there was no secondary panel"
Click to expand...

Been there, done that.

The one I remember best was a sub panel behind a refrigerator in the basement. The complaint was several receptacles and a light or two was N/F. I used my voo-doo devices to trace the wiring's open to a spot somewhere behind a full size refrigerator. I informed the customoid that the fridge had to be moved so I could figure out the best place to open up the wall, based upon my equipment's readings.

Frige was moved, panel discovered, breaker re-set and life was good. I think I spent the better part of an hour tracing that dead line down.
 
Oh, BTW, in my book there are two kinds of electrical problems. N/F, or Not Functioning, and N/F/P, or Not Functioning Properly. This is a carry over from my vehicle electrical systems days.

N/F means that as soon as stuff that's supposed to come on, comes on, I can wrap things up and skee-daddle.

N/F/P includes intermittent problems. Those require a bit more skill, timing, luck and a recently calibrated cryeeestal ball. Has anyone ever noticed that it is not uncommon for the electrical problem to be solved to stop acting up when you came on site?
 
I don't even let them tell me driving directions. I cut them off and say, I just need the address.

I also like when customers try to tell me "It just stopped working, I'm not sure when." Then I ask if they've had any work done and they say no.

While I'm investigating they come back and say, "Come to think of it, we had this book case installed and I don't remember the light working after that."

Sure enough, the book case didn't fit flush with the wall because of a receptacle, so they took out the receptacle and taped up the wires.
 
Getting paid for the time shouldn't be an issue. I told him about what it may cost to do all the search & destroy, sort of worst case estimate. We should come out OK. I will go over it with the boss Mon morning. I kept him in the loop every few hrs, letting him know what I found/didn't find.
 
starbolin said:
They'll always tell you that it's not the software. They 'checked the software.' We'll, sorry to tell them, it's always the software.
Click to expand...

My experience is that it is almost never the software. Maladjusted or defective limit switches are probably the number one reason we go out on service calls to fix "software" problems.

I can't recall ever actually going on a service call to fix a software bug where it really was a software bug (except start-ups). It is always something that is not as obvious as one would like so they blame the software when they can't find it. Why they think the software is to blame for a machine that has been running for 10 or 20 years escapes me.

Probably the number 2 reason for software bug calls is people who have repaired or modified something and then it does not work right anymore. Like replacing a 1000 line encoder with a 1024 line encoder because that was "close enough".
 
Home Economics classroom. Circuit not powered. We can not find the panel. Finally find it. It is 8 inches off the floor hidden inside a lectern. Turns out they had taken out a wall which left the panel floating free in the middle of the room. So they lowered it and built a lectern around it.

I think we finally found it by tracing all the feeder conduits from the service.
 
petersonra said:
My experience is that it is almost never the software. Maladjusted or defective limit switches are probably the number one reason we go out on service calls to fix "software" problems.

I can't recall ever actually going on a service call to fix a software bug where it really was a software bug (except start-ups). It is always something that is not as obvious as one would like so they blame the software when they can't find it. Why they think the software is to blame for a machine that has been running for 10 or 20 years escapes me.

Probably the number 2 reason for software bug calls is people who have repaired or modified something and then it does not work right anymore. Like replacing a 1000 line encoder with a 1024 line encoder because that was "close enough".
Click to expand...

"It's the software," or "it's the PLC" are often the excuses I see, when it's an obvious physical cause to the malfunction. Crushed cable, smashed prox, something not plugged in, etc... People tend to blame the thing they understand the least. The little magic box with all the wires and blinky lights usually fits the bill.

I try to build equipment that is functional and reliable, and tells the operator when things are wrong. Not just "system unhappy," but "this particular thing broken, and thus system unhappy" messages. Some people just don't read...

Between that, and having operators tell me what actually happened when something goes wrong, it can be a nightmare. "Dunno. It's broke." isn't a helpful answer. Our operator front end software logs everything; it makes figuring out what happened much easier. It's almost always operator error, too. Grrrrrr.



-SceneryDriver
 
:lol: Some of these crack me up! I used the voodoo magic wire tracer and told the customer I would need top open the wall because everything I'm finding is telling me buried j-box.
We go in the bathroom and he takes the hanging mirror down and exposes a 4/0 j-box! :eek:
I open the cover, remake the connections, check everything and find it working, put the cover on, he re-hangs the mirror!
Write me a check! Buried j-box was accessible so not really buried.

Things you see....
 
starbolin said:
Junior engineers are worse. The first thing they want is to blurt out their pet theory. I'll appreciate their input, but later! I need to work the problem from the outside in. I can't afford to get narrow focus too soon. Their pet theory and list-of-things-that-have-already-been-tried were obviously wrong or I wouldn't be here. When they start "I think it's ..." I stop them. Dont' tell me yet. I don't want to know.

If the junior engineer or technician think the symptoms have a common cause then the probably have multiple sources. If the JE thinks there are multiple sources then there is probably a common cause.

They'll always tell you that it's not the software. They 'checked the software.' We'll, sorry to tell them, it's always the software.

And, as to that list-of-things-that-have-already-been-tried, I'm going to do them again cause you missed something.
Click to expand...

Can't say I can agree with the tone of this post.

I do agree that you should be objective about figuring out the problem and not accept things people tell you as gospel. They may have a piece of critical information when you stop them. I believe you should rethink your blanketed opinion on junior engineers. You were a junior electrician/engineer once.

In my experience (~3 years) aside from startups, it is almost always field equipment or wiring.
 
kwired said:
City people....... an address only don't always work so well in rural areas:p
Click to expand...


Doesn't always work in Boston either.
They have the same street name in different areas of the city.
You might have the same street name in Dorchester and Roxbury.
It makes it fun when you are meeting someone and you both go to different addresses with the same name. :lol:
 
And you get places like San Francisco that has numbered streets and numbered avenues, and they are in different parts of the city.

As for troubleshooting, I always listen, then selectively verify to see if the info is any good. If much of it checks out, I'll go with it. Also depends on who's telling me. '"But it works everywhere else" is a bad sign.
 
K8MHZ said:
Oh, BTW, in my book there are two kinds of electrical problems. N/F, or Not Functioning, and N/F/P, or Not Functioning Properly. This is a carry over from my vehicle electrical systems days.

N/F means that as soon as stuff that's supposed to come on, comes on, I can wrap things up and skee-daddle.

N/F/P includes intermittent problems. Those require a bit more skill, timing, luck and a recently calibrated cryeeestal ball. Has anyone ever noticed that it is not uncommon for the electrical problem to be solved to stop acting up when you came on site?
Click to expand...

Sorta like how your car stops making that ominous sound as you pull up to your mechanic's shop? :roll:
 
I remember a long time ago went on service call power out to rear portion of rowhome 1st and 2nd flr customer took me to basement where 2 100 amp panels were she said all are on not tripped. It waqs a real old home I said where are the fuse boxes that used to feed stuff because there weren't any old evidence of old panels in basement, she said out back theres a box opened fuse box no fuses someone took the fuses charged for call and got the job to remove the fuse boxes
 
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