Days are getting shorter, winter creeps slowly closer and closer and we will certainly have a lot of use for our power tools. It boils down to one word: electricity!
So, last night, our able electrician, B., came in to check the installation and deal with the nasty looking worms nest of burned cables sticking out of the wall in the main room.
B. is normally pretty outspoken, but while surveying the place he seemed to have his vocabulary reduced to few words, normally considered pretty uncivil. The main switchboard being a neat slab of marble; secondary one (in the kitchen) getting power probably from Zeus himself, as there was no way to cut it off; Pandora connection box in the big room; breakers never touched since being installed (because hot-wire patching is fun, apparently). Layers and layers of ancient art of electrotechnics (the blocks were built in 1930s!), quick fixes throughout decades and merry improvisations of recent squatting dwellers made the installation, erm… adventurous.
After getting through the shock, however, B. stated that there is only one point of failure that has to be dealt with. The Pandora connection box. All other circuits, messy as they looked, are safe and operational and can be used after minor adjustments by yours truly.
So we focused at the sinister splotch of burned paint, surrounding a hole in the wall. Thanks to some ingenuity and a lot of multimeter work, we identified all cables. Also, there was a need to re-lay some of them, as they were broken in the wall. Fortunately, they were laid in the tube, not directly plastered in.
So, after 2-3 hours of work we were done. Now we have fully operational lighting and power circuits throughout the flat (sockets to be replaced with new one — easy job), separate circuit for the cooker and hot water tank and another one for heating devices. We have power!
