David kept telling me that the electrical problem in our house was serious and dangerous, wires were 'leaking electricity' among other things. I nodded, said okay, and we kept on going.
It all started who knows when? When we moved in to be sure, and then this summer while we were gone, there was lots of flooding and the power kept going out. Our greatest friends helped big time with this, getting the power back on, etc. But not before all of my frozen strawberries melted, leaked out of the freezer, and covered the floor. Of course by the time they arrived the floor wasn't pink/red. No, it was one black swarm of a million ants. We received this email after being in the States less than a week.
But when we returned and David checked it all out, he was seriously concerned. And, since he is the engineer and knows how it all works, I heeded his warnings of cost, time, and trouble, and we decided to go ahead with re-wiring.
We discussed it all with our landlords and they were very helpful and concerned as well. The various electricians we had take a look, blamed all of our devices overheating a wire somewhere. Possible.
When I told my good friend/neighbor this situation, she said: "oh! Yes, before we refinished our place (same exact apartment just two doors down), our contractor told us the original wires were all bad quality so we spent a lot of money to switch them all out." Hmm....good to know.
The breaker box, day of. What they did was quite incredible, it only took two days of no power, and we had it back at night in most places. We did have to move everything away from the walls and remove the entire cabinet that covers up the breaker box. That in and of itself made it look like we were moving for two days. I shuttled the kids to and from school in the morning and afternoon, and I held down the fort because David was away doing visa stuff and lots of other work stuff. He kept checking in on the progress and kept in contact with the electricians about what they were doing.
When they removed the cover I saw this. One hole burnt to a crisp indeed. This is in our laundry room. But this was not the problem. No, they discovered a wire they could not pull out between the office and our bedroom, it must have melted and was causing the problems.At least they found it! This was where they had to break through a wall to get it out.
Now our whole house is grounded, which is why we were shocked (HA HA) when I got literally shocked just one day later by our water machine. We called the guy back, our landlord came over. They tested the machine and sure enough 220 volts of electricity were 'leaking' out of it, talk about dangerous, it certainly hurt me up to my shoulder and gave me a headache. We all decided it was the actual water machine shorting out. Our landlord even said, "you know all this stuff is made in China, it is supposed to be this way (he used his hands to show) but it is really put in that way."
Go figure.
