Day 69, GCFI Outlet Tester (and a small project in motion)
Caveat: I am not an electrician. I have acquired just enough information over the years so that I feel reasonably comfortable performing certain basic repairs, but anything more complex than replacing a broken switch or outlet, and I call in the professionals. I advise you to do the same.
If you do any kind of household repairs of electrical outlets, I feel like it's a good idea to have some rudimentary test equipment to make sure that you've done the job well. A relatively cheap gadget that can quickly test for a variety of possible faults is an outlet tester. I have this one made by Sperry:
It's cheap (about $15) and can quickly double check for a variety of faults that might arise from miswiring an outlet. I previously had an older home that had, shall we say "creative?" electrical wiring, and we detected a couple of issues that were easily corrected once detected. And I've used this to test power strips to make sure that all the sockets had good ground connections (it is a serious safety risk if they do not) after watching this video:
I checked all mine and didn't find any ones that exhibited grounding problems, but I felt much better after doing the check.
For my ongoing DIY CNC project, I was thinking that I should wire a metal junction box to the bench to provide all the power to the workbench. Sure, I could have used a commercially available one, but I had some spare metal junction boxes and outlets lying around, so I thought I'd DIY one up.
Caveat: if you didn't have this stuff lying around, it probably would be just as cheap and less of a hassle to buy something like this 4 Outlet Power Block with an integrated switch from Home Depot. It has the advantage of having a built in breaker as well, which mine lacks (but the longer cord that I will use to plug it in does, so it's not reallyh that important, but I digress.) I decided to go ahead and do it because work on my CNC proper has stalled and I felt like doing something in the shop, so I went ahead and put this together.
A real electrician could probably have wired this together in about 10 minutes or less. It took me about an hour.
Eventually it will get screwed to the side of my bench, once I've determined the optimal place to put it. It's very nearly bulletproof, and passes all the tests, including most importantly that I have the grounding hooked up properly.
Happy Tuesday all.