My First Array as a Foreman

Here's the album

Maybe this post is going to be a little self-indulgent. But let me try to make it interesting: when I first started in construction, the job was about being outside, being physical, being in an environment where locking your immediate supervisor in the porta-potty was something you did sometimes. That was great, and from time to time, it still is. Having just made foreman, I'm learning what this job becomes when it morphs into something that is much more social and mental than it is physical.

I still step back and admire my work, but less and less often is "my work" a matter of perfect alignment, or raw speed, or tool knowhow. Now it is a matter of quality control, efficiency, and planning. But I'm still outdoors, and last week when I put a sign on my tools that read, "Ask first," somebody changed it to "Ass first".

In fact, nothing has really been lost. If I want to pick up a ratchet, I still can. Just for some reason, I now feel this tremendous attachment to the jobs I build. Or maybe it will just be to the first one?

On Trade Work and Motherhood

Now that I am engaged, I am struck by this new way I have of relating to women and their love of their children: a mother is like a carpenter, who will build one, two, perhaps three truly involved masterpiece custom homes in her lifetime. On the day of the open house, you bet they're at the door with bells on. Hey mom, I love you too.

:)

Stealing Power

I've been meaning to tell this story for a while, but I was sort of subconsciously worried about the legal implications. Just a few days ago, the problem mysteriously vanished, so I guess now it's open season: I caught someone stealing power.

I shouldn't say I caught them; that would imply some kind of sleuthing on my part, and some attempt at concealment on theirs. I've been an electrician for just over a year now. I've probably been into about five hundred private homes in that time. I've suspected power was being stolen two or three times, but I'd never before seen it being done right at the meter socket, where the meter reader couldn't possibly miss it. Yet, lo and behold. Perhaps I should explain.

The utility knows how much money you owe for your electricity because it all has to pass through the meter before you can get your grubby blender all over it. "But," some of you can be heard thinking, "What if it didn't pass through the meter first?" Exactly. Between the tap atop the service pole in the street and your meter, there are typically a hundred feet or so of cable. If you were to tap off of that cable, the electricity would be free.

If the thought of this being illegal and immoral isn't interesting enough, consider this: it is also difficult and dangerous. The only way those wires aren't live is if a giant breaker (2700 amps in the only instance I was ever personally aware of) on the utility pole trips. In other words, if you plan to steal power, and you make a mistake (or a cobweb falls to the wrong spot at the wrong moment), a whole lot of force is going to come down the line before it shuts off.

To compound matters, unless you want that breaker to be your only line of defense against junior running the central air and the microwave while using his hair dryer, you've got to put a smaller breaker at the spot of the tap. And you've got to do it in a way that can't be spotted from the street when the meter reader comes around. Stop and ask yourself how much of your service drop can't be seen from the street. Correct: none of it.



So, I was pretty surprised when I saw this: a complete circumvention of the impossible dream that is electricity theft. Where was the challenge? Where was the artisanship? For heaven's sake, where was the meter reader? Someone just popped the meter clean out and put a couple of jumper wires in its place. This is the equivalent of winning the Indy 500 because all the other cars run out of gas. Congratulations, yes, but nobody really takes you seriously.

I guess the point I'm trying to make with all this is, for every person who finds it entertaining to hypothetically plan great heists and escapes, there is a person who accidentally robs a bank with a banana.

The Architect, the Engineer, and the Builder

I had another one of those little experiences today that put me in mind of the great never-ending game of paper-rock-scissors that we play in construction. I refer of course to the timeless conflict between the architect, the engineer, and the builder.

It breaks down like this: the architect is supposed to design the building. Is it fat or skinny? Green or pink? Does it have a moat? A golf course? The architect is your man.

The engineer is supposed to make the whole thing fly. How do we get a vaulted ceiling to stand up like that? Proper dungeons need to be at least six feet below grade.

The builder is charged with reconciling these soaring visions with reality. That plumbing stack has to go somewhere, bub.

I'm mostly familiar with the builder's view of things. I once had to pull about three hundred feet of wire through all the twists and turns of a three-story custom house because the architect changed his mind and decided that the fans on the front balcony had to be a mirror image of the fans on the rear balcony. To be fair, I did weep at the elegant simplicity of the resulting vacation home. But I still generally believe that if engineers could learn to color-coordinate, we could eliminate an entire profession and use the extra money on legos.

Today, our architect (who turned out to be a very nice person) failed to provide any of his electrical subs with that obscure piece of lore, a set of plans. The result isn't that nobody knows what to do, but rather that nobody has any nuclear weapon with which to enforce the righteousness of their vision. Of course, we all wanted our hardware right next to the main panel; that means the shortest wire run to our power source.

The way builders settle this stuff is what proves that we still need architects: every team just started drilling holes, in a race to get wires into the wall. In the absence of plans, we're all pretty ready to fall back on "I was here first." It eventually leads to some awkward moments, where we all admit that we don't really know what the plans call for, or who has dibs on that wide-open joist bay (probably the HVAC guy). It dawns on us that the architect isn't around, so we jovially blame him, then someone gets him on the phone.

I won't pick on engineers today. If any architects stumble on this, I'd love to hear stories of builders screwing up on you. I'm sure it works both ways.

Translucent Concrete

I've got an interesting story coming down the pipe, but in the meantime, I thought I'd raise a coolness flag about translucent concrete. This is apparently less than cutting-edge (people date the proof-of-concept at somewhere between 1999 and 2004), but currently, I don't think you'd see this technology at anything less noteworthy than a small national museum.

On the plus side: unbreakable "windows" that don't need to be headed off, or insulated. Floors that can be lit from below. Industrial spaces that now can be completely lit with ultra-low-cost, healthy daylight. Unbreakable light fixtures for urban renewal. 'Clear' swimming pools, 'clear' retaining walls. I'm sure I'm barely scratching the surface.

On the minus side: concrete takes a lot of energy to produce. Producing a lot of it means getting it from a batch plant, which is a hassle. Currently, making this stuff means laying it in yourself, very carefully. A translucent Grand Central Station is probably a long way off.

Still, solar panels were once 45-watts-a-pop pipe dreams. I'll be back in ten years to check on my prediction that this will be big.

That's Not A Garden

I'd like to start out this guest entry by thanking Bret for the invite! I am, clearly, a big fan of his work. :)

I was there at the Idea House, I saw the whole thing, and it was jaw dropping, for sure. . . there is more to be told than there is space or time to tell it, but I'll do my best.

Basically, the house was a giant advert. If you bought ad space in Sunset, I'm sure your products were there. Case in point: The first thing I noticed after we'd driven through miles of wine country hillside - the cere, golden hills that roll across the east bay - was a strip of lawn. Now, to be fair, it was a tiny strip of lawn (cut down in size from the original plan drawn up by the architect, in fact). But this patch of lawn (10' square) was dominated by a lawn mowing robot which was about the size of a carry-on piece of luggage. Not a polite, stowed-under-the-seat-in-front-of-you carry-on either; one of those big roll on types that the people sitting next to you spend five minutes trying to force into the overhead bin that until recently contained a delicate souvenir Murano glass perfume bottle.



So, for this 10x10 patch of grass in a house they advertise as a showcase for energy saving technologies, they use a piece of equipment that costs $2500 and took oil, steel, and whatever else to manufacture as well as energy to run (no, it wasn't powered by alternative energy). If anyone out there is considering a lawn in a 10x10 patch of dirt in the dry California countryside, make it a thyme lawn - no watering, no mowing, no shopping for thyme in the grocery store.

That was only the first mistake. There was a redbud (cercis canadensis) in the middle of the entryway; cercis is a hot tree right now, but not good for hot weather - it's an under-story tree, which means it takes part shade, not full sun, and it was showing the stress; the leaves were spotted (plants do get sunburn!) and droopy. On top of that it's just way out of place in a landscape dotted with scrub. Mesquite would have been far more appropriate for the style of the house.

The hill in the back of the house was dotted with plants from Monrovia - sedum variety "Autumn Joy," english lavender, and bunny tail grasses. These are all plants that can take the conditions, but it's like going to a steak house and ordering a hamburger - they went with Monrovia, perhaps the most expensive dealer on the market - and they bought plants that you could get at Home Depot, or start yourself from seeds and cuttings. On top of that, the plants were planted recently - in the heat of summer, no rain to come. Even drought tolerant plants will die in those conditions - and thats what they were busy doing when we saw them. See below:



That's nothing, though, compared to the plants that weren't even alive to begin with - plastic agaves dotted the interior.

The biggest travesty, though, was the rubber mulch. Mulch is, traditionally, shredded or chipped wood or other organic matter which is spread over the soil in a planting bed. The purpose of mulch, so you know, is to retain water in the soil by preventing evaporation, and improving the quality of the soil as the mulch decomposes and is worked into the earth by heave and worms.

Rubber mulch, on the other hand, is made from old tires. Its purpose is to look ugly. A lot of people think rubber mulch is a great idea. "Won't decompose!" the ads read. Only too true. Heave and earthworms work it down into your soil and there it sits for pretty much ever. You are not improving soil quality with rubber mulch. You are littering.

I think I'll leave off there. I could go on but I won't. This is, after all, a guest entry. We'll see if I'm asked back. :)

Thank you again, Bret!

The Sunset Magazine Idea House

Well, I'd heard this thing was a cool product showcase, so I thought I'd check out the Sunset Idea House down in Alamo. What a joke. In retrospect, I might have expected a marketing offensive in the form of a McMansion in the Diablo Foothills, but I expected the promises of "Innovation", "Exciting trends" and "Forward thinking" to be at least partially fulfilled.

To begin with the fairly trivial, the styling on the place was ridiculous. From the seven-foot-tall outdoor fountain that needed to be plugged into a wall outlet, to the hydraulic-mount flatscreen television by the pool, the place wanted from the very beginning to trade money for taste. Strike one.

I'll admit, as an electrician, I don't know too much about what makes a stylish shower, or what the latest thinking in gas lighting is (think of that: with gaslighting making a comeback, your plumber might be hacking out your outdoor lighting design in the near future. *shudder*?) But I do know outlets. Decora is fine for a flip remodel. But if you're going to call it an 'idea house', these are the guys you want: Acenti by Leviton. Needless to say, I drove forty miles today and for the outlets I saw, I coulda driven to Home Depot.

Low-voltage lighting controls? Lutron? Homeworks? Scene lighting or great features like nightlighting a path to the kitchen with one button by the bedroom door? Ha ha. They had it in one room, and it looked like they were trying to hide it. I was admonished not to touch! I'll never know what it did...

Fiber Optic Lighting? Forget it.

Okay, okay, this isn't a design blog. Let me complain a bit about being green. The driving principle here, people, is the energy crisis. You'd never know it in some parts of California, but generating electricity is difficult, dirty, and expensive. You shouldn't just throw it away on a whim. But that is exactly what this house does.

Central air in a 3000sq. ft. 4BR? You bet! Was the roof facing south for solar? Windows with casements aligned to catch breezes? Not on your life. No thermal massing (masonry walls which act as natural insulators), and no passive solar (darkly painted exteriors for collecting heat). There were a couple of skylights. Not completely irredeemable. But then again, no solar water heating (which is a complete no-brainer).

I'd love to lay into their gardening choices too. The bad news is, I'm not an expert. The good news is, I have signed a gardener up to guest-write a bit! She'll be along shortly. So we'll break up this rant for the time being. The moral of the story is, don't look to Sunset Magazine for design or engineering ideas. That seems pretty simple reading it back. But I guess you never know until you go. Or until I go for you.

There are certain trades you shouldn't skimp on

I was working today on one of those total gut-and-rebuild remodels that we used to see a lot more of back in the dotcom days. We were doing the solar, of course, so that brought us into some contact with the main electrical panel. Turns out a previous electrician, and one who had been there pretty recently, was too tired to run the armored cable all the way to the main panel, so (s)he(?) just cut the armor about five feet short, and ran the separate conductors through a hole he drilled all by himself. To top the whole thing off, he manually wrapped the ground wire from this cable around the Grounding Electrode Conductor, again, outside the box. This was all done within two feet of the gas main. It was one of those amazing laugh-out-loud call-the-other-guys over moments that makes me wish I had a camera phone.

Now, this may or may not have had anything to do with the van parked out front with "Electricians" spelled wrong on it, in Spanish, I kid you not, with shoe polish. I can't make any definitive claims of any kind. But I was suspicious!

I'll say this: there are some trades to skimp on. Go ahead, hire your workmate's cousin! Painting. Drywall. Cable Guy (these guys are actually required by law to be idiots). And there are some you should not: Plumber. Roofer. E. LEC. TRICIAN. For God's sake people, it takes half an amp in the wrong place to kill you. It takes less than that in a place like your gas main to get your blown-up former house on the evening news.

Anyway, I'm fairly confident that anyone who has something coming to them will get it, in this case. I know our work is permitted and will be inspected. Hopefully when the inspector sees what's up, the appropriate warnings and admonishments will get where they need to go.