It's Electric!!

Boogie woogie woogie!

Here is the classic video for your 80's viewing pleasure. Trust me. It's worth watching. I think all those outfits are going to come back around soon :) Mom and Dad you should have saved those rad clothes of yours! You would have been totally ahead of the game!!

So, you may have guessed that this post is about my parents' bad clothes our house's electric. Or really lack there of. As I mentioned in this post, the upstairs of our house had basically no lighting and was void of electric outlets. Downstairs, there are plenty of outlets but they are all two pronged (with the exception of the ones located in the kitchen), the living room and guest bedroom have no overhead lighting, and the entryway had a pull-string light, minus the pull-string. Suffice it to say, we needed to do some work.

Starting at the beginning of it all, there was LITerally (name that show ;) ) only a 30 amp electric service to the house. Now, this probably doesn't really mean that much to me, or any other person who doesn't know much about electric, but 30 amps is absolutely ridiculous. When the electrician came to asses our house for a new service, he said that we were probably one of THE LAST houses in our town to have a 30 amp service.

Just to give you an idea, the average home will most likely have 100 amp or 200 amp electric service in their house. They need that much power nowadays to run say-a dryer, washer, and air conditioner all at the same time. If we even turned on two of those things a fuse would have blown. Goodness knows I hate when a fuse blows. So we decided our electric service was a priority and needed to be replaced immediately.

Oh and here is a horrible diagram I drew up to show you our original electric panel (since I forgot to take a picture of it.)

As you can see, there were three basic fuses and a random electric box off to the right with wires sticking out all over. Yes, the wires are those curly cues :) All of those wires were exposed and just waiting patiently to electrocute some innocent bystander. They were leaching out ready to grab their next victim!

To complicate things even further we had knob and tube wiring.

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Knob and tube wiring is relatively safe, but definitely not the best. Most old homes will have this early type of electric but it is much better if you can replace it as you update the home. Ours is in decent shape, but is beginning to become brittle and definitely runs the risk of being an attractive snack to rodents. Because you know, our house is riddled with the mini, four-legged creatures haha. Either way, Liz would feel a lot better knowing that all of this was out of the house and updated! (See that nice point-of-view change there??)

So, the electricians came and installed our brand new electric service. After this picture was taken, National Grid came and installed our new meter!

The outside box leads to this brand-spankin'-new panel on the inside wall of our basement. Isn't he ravishingly handsome? Plus, he has sparkling new accessories that the electrician was kind enough to add: the light switch and outlet to the right leading to the pretty new light on the left.

We think the new 100 amp service will suit us nicely. It leaves us plenty of ampage to expand and add electric anywhere we need to! Now, we just need to work on the first floor situation and tie-in our new electric on the second story!