Shocking Truths About Home Wiring

Electricity is our friend.

It washes our clothes, cleans our floors and keeps us warm at night.

But like some friends - and we all have these kind, don’t we? - you have to keep an eye on it because it will kick you in the butt if it gets a notion to do so and you aren’t paying enough attention.

As self-reliant and self-sufficient homeowners, though, this does not mean that we have to leave old Mr. Electron entirely to the professionals. The dedicated and determined do-it-yourselfer can indeed add electrical jobs to his or her home renovation resume and live to tell about it.

The first step in this process, though, is a ruthless self-examination. You must confront your handymanhood more bluntly than in most undertakings. You must look into your very heart of hearts and ask yourself, “Am I such a klutz that I am more likely to orphan my children or burn the house down by trying to install this electrical switch?” And the true answer to that question, for many of us, is too painful to acknowledge.

For this reason, my recommendation is to enlist the aid of an electrician, at least in a supervisory capacity. Most companies, like Merit Electric Inc. of Spokane, will sit down and discuss your plan with you. And they will tell you if you are courting death.

“A lot of people out there have absolutely no concept of what’s going on when it comes to electrical installation,” says Dennis Johnson, an estimator for Merit. “I can usually tell in a basic conversation whether someone can do it on his own.”

So how can we preserve our handyman self-esteem and still not toast our loved ones? By striking a compromise. We can allow the electrical professionals to do the death-defying stuff and feed our do-it-yourself egos at the same time.

Here’s an important hint. If the wire you are messing with isn’t connected to anything down in the basement, you are usually pretty safe.

In my most recent project, I opened the walls, installed all the electrical boxes, pulled all the wires to the boxes, ran each circuit down to the basement, and left the wires all dangling in front of the electrical service box that the electricians were updating. And much to their delight, I even remembered to write on each wire what sort of things it was hooking up — like “second floor southeast bedroom lights and outlets” — so they didn’t have to spend all day running up and down stairs to figure out whether to tie the whole thing into a 20 amp or 15 amp circuit, or whether I had incorrectly mixed kitchen outlets and kitchen lights into a single circuit.

The representatives of the electrical company I hired to update my service panels were more than happy to take a few moments to see if my work would pass inspection. (Another hint: Don’t even think about doing an electrical job without buying a building permit and getting the required inspections.)

And now I can put on my best Barney Fife air of smugness and say to my envious friends and neighbors, “Yup, I wired her myself.”

Pulling all these wires and adding the outlets and switches is a very labor-intensive job, you see, and doing it yourself can save you a significant amount off your electrician bill.

Of course, as you might suspect, the electricians have their own version of that story.

“Well, if you figure out how much your time is worth, I’m not sure how much you really save,” Johnson says. “You’ll pay more for your materials than I will, you have to take the time to go get your permits. And remember, we’re a lot more efficient at doing this than you are.”

Time? Efficiency? What about man’s primal urge to tame the unruly forces of nature and claim dominion over all aspects of home repair?

Johnson may know a lot about electricity, but he knows next to nothing about the heart and soul of doing it yourself.