Strangest thing you saw??

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sdbob

Senior Member
Re: Strangest thing you saw??

OK, maybe this is off-topic, 'cause it really didn't need trouble shooting, but...

The strangest thing I've EVER seen is a 240 volt water heater.

No, no, no, not a normal water heater. The kind they had in Honduras when I worked on a hospital there.

A 240 volt water heater, that spun on the end of your shower pipe, and has two little pigtails coming out of it that wire-nutted to the romex tailed out of the wall. Frio or Caliente, take your pick.

The worst part is the showers weren't tiled, they were made of metal.

At least it kept my mind of the 1 1/2" cockroaches while I took a shower. :D
 
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jes25

Senior Member
Location
Midwest
Re: Strangest thing you saw??

I saw the same thing in Brazil. You have to run the water kinda slow so it has a chance to get hot. I asked aome of the locals if they ever got shocked and they said "You only get shocked if you touch it" in portuguese of course. All the wiring I saw was just open no. 12 THHN :eek: This is how it was done in new construction.
 
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richwaskowitz

Senior Member
Location
Shelby Twp. MI, near Detroit
Re: Strangest thing you saw??

If we're taling about foreign countries here.....

I did a job in a little steel mill in Mexico where they ran about 400 control conductors from a control panel, underground about 300 feet to an operator's console out in a dirt field and all this was in sections of perforated 4 inch styrene water drainage pipe. They actually slipped the sections of pipe over the bundle of wires as they were digging the 12 inch deep trench. All this to the devices at the station with 400 wire nuts.

Another thing I saw there was how they built motor control centers out of plywood and nailed the starters and relays to it. Instead of wire duct, they drove some nails in and taped the wires to them.
 
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stanley

Member
Re: Strangest thing you saw??

Again, it seems the stangest things we have seen have been out of counry. In Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas I noticed in an alley an open meterbase with #4 wires stabbed into the meter socket. (the pressure clamps the meter would plug into)

This trio of wires were then tie wrapped up the riser and 100' down the alley where they dropped over and through an open window. God only knows where they went after that.
 
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hurk27

Senior Member
Location
Portage, Indiana NEC: 2008
Re: Strangest thing you saw??

The strangest thing I ever ran into was a Chicago three-way about 15 years ago. I did figure it out after a few blown fuses and a few shocks but it did throw me for a loop.

Now for out of the country:
Venezuela. My dad and me and a few friends took our sail boat on a cruse down through the Caribbean for about a month in the spring of "78". when we went from Trinidad & Tobago to Barcelona I notice that the way the houses was wired was a mess, Joe Tedesco has a photo of what the service looked like. It was a power pole with about 30 meters hanging from the wires, reminded me of a christmas tree decorated by meters LOL :roll: . The wires just ran accross to the houses or rooms and ran through the windows in side of the house the wires were supported only by nails in the walls and would have a receptacle dangleing off the end of each tap. We were told that the home owner or owner of the property climbs the pole and does the hook ups but the voltage was only 110 as the way they stated it. :eek:
 
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alan mcneil

Member
Location
Massachusetts
Re: Strangest thing you saw??

I was re-habing an old wool warehouse and saw what looked like a tin pie pan nailed to the ceiling, the pie pan had what looked like wires looped and radiating from the center of the pie pan; sort of looked like a many petal flower.
I removed the pie pan and discovered that the wires were actually capillary copper tubing.
After thinking about this device I concluded that this must be part of an old fire alarm system.
The heat from a fire would expand the air inside the capillary and push on a diaphram and probably ring a bell???? The building was built around
1850.
 
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