frenchelectrican

I just wonding who have pretty crazy service call on their list like very insane or funny one.


my is most funny one.

one guy asked me about the lumiaire question he say he want " natual sunlight " i asked him little more clear what he mean and i told him you want a weatherproofed outdoor mirror to shine the sunlight to inside of the building ?? he replyed to me saying yeah that the one i want i say ok but honestly i never get around with that idea but it was funny one and the end result i put in " light tunnel " with back up CFL in there it.


My most insane service call was one idiot did put in wrong breaker on 480 volt system and left a hole in cement wall [ basketball sized hole ]

so let other guys tell me what your crazy one or funny one on here


Merci , Marc

bruce73401

a guy called me wanting a fluorescent fixture installed in the attic and we got up there and the guy was growing weed in the attic.

Mountain Electrician

Crawling around in one attic, I noticed a Square D QO 6/12 panel lying there with some #4 tri-plex sticking out of it. After I looked a little closer, it turns out the tri-plex was run over to the wall behind the 2" mast. They had taken a hole saw and cut through the wall and the back of the 2" rigid, pulled enough slack down from the drip loop to make a splice, and used split bolt connectors to tie in the tri-plex. I was impressed in as much as they used circuit breakers, and good ones at that. Another time, a guy who had just gotton out of prison for growing pot tried to convince me to design a PLC system to monitor generator power and manage grow lights. Talk about not getting it!

Louieb

received a call to hang a fixture,thought it was odd that they wanted an estimate...The woman told me that the light weighed about 40 lbs. went I got there the fixture weighed 175 Lbs Alabaster type the kind you see hanging in the front entrance to a casino....box was 22 ft up ,I told them I have to use a chandelier motorized lift and crawled into the attic via 2ft by 2 ft scuttle hole in a bedroom closet after surveying the situation gave them the price...after allot of BS the husband is telling me that the fixture could be hung with the two six thirty twos that came with it. he would do it but he didnt have a ladder that high ,I told him for a nominal fee I would lend him mine, I scribbled the number on a buisness card and said bye, as I was going out the door,they informed me i was the ninth person who told them that.I dont know what they did

brian john

Years ago I had a lady in a 6 story condo complaining that she had to install lights when the people on the 6th floor had skylights. She asked if I installed skylights, I said I could, but bit out of my trade and she was on the 3rd floor the neighbors above her might complain about the hole in the floor.

Had a call 2:30 AM from a building engineer I know, wanted me to talk him through resetting a 4000 amp GFP protected switch, as his property manager did not want to pay OT for a service call.

I told him I could but would feel better if I came there in person to survey the issue. I finally convinced him (I WAS WIDE AWAKE BY NOW) that I would come and he would not pay me if it was a nuisance trip. Got there walked 12 floors shutting off bus duct FSS. Megged the bus DEAD SHORT. I eventually found a short on the line side of a FSS bus stabs had thermal damage arcing to ground across the charred insulating material.

Did a temporary repair to get them on line prior to building hours.

Who knows what would have happened had he closed that 4000 Amp switch, but I bet the property manager would have said "I told him to get help".

The property manager gave the repairs to another company.

oldman

doesn't that just burn your ass?

bet the company that got it gave the property management company great rate M-F 7-4, but kicked the ever loving hell out of them any other time.

OregonYeti

I went to a call for heat pump not working. The compressor was shorted to ground. Since there was no ground wire, the 240 V had shorted onto the refrigerant line and blew a hole inside the building.

Grounding can be a good thing.

brian john

In a wood frame structures, with PVC water and waste piping and NM conductors, grounding really relies on the EDG. In commercial office buildings with metal studs, drop ceilings, armor clad cable, HVAC ducts, re-bar etc, it is hard for something not to be grounded, accidentally if not intentionally as mandated by the NEC.

Try tracing down stray (ground) current with an amp clamp, the paths are multiple, though the current does tend to stay close to the source (phase) conductors (I read this fact sometime ago but can not reference the source).

Electricity does not just follow the path of least resistance as some teach, but like water takes all paths available.

Louieb

Marc The light tunnel you reference to, is it similar to the product at this site solartube.com

Bkessler

How about a old lady with a very thick boston accent calling me over for an emergency, and when i got there she pointed to a duplex with nothing plugged into it in her hallway and said " I want this plug turned off it's running all the time"

__________________
When ls lunch

wiremeup

HO insisted that her vanity light switch was not working. She pointed out the switch by the bathroom door and insisted that switch was not working. Spent 45 minutes taking apart bathroom switches and light fixture, trying to trace wires, etc. Solution, bulb in fan/light combo was out, switch for vanity light was beside the vanity... behind her hand towel.

brian john

Worse call I ever received was from a customer, total power outage in a commercial office building. I dropped everything to run across town. When I got there another contractor was pulling up, we both went into the building to find a 3rd contractor was looking at the gear. I asked the customer what was going on. He said in emergency situations he always calls 3 contractors, first one there gets the work.

GUESS WHAT I TOLD HIM TO DO. In addition I asked for my contact information from his rolodex and any possible business cards he might have. I also told him in no uncertain terms was to never call my company again. He was sooooooo stupid he could not understand my angst.

frenchelectrican

Ouch Brian that really get ya pretty hard and do it for naught !!

The other insane service call i got when one guy try to get a 50 HP DC motor to work with the VFD !! I say Huh ?? then i told the comuster to get the right controller and he say no way he qouted " it work fine before !! "" and i say ok then i refuse to hook up the motor at all i just get my tools and just out of the building and charge him for my service call and few days later he called me again this time very colourfull langunge which i just can't say it in here [ i dont want to get kicked out on this one ] and finally get it fixed right with new contoller for DC motour.


Merci , Marc

jason007

the boss and i went on a service call the other day. an old lady had called sayin no power in the bed room. breaker was tripped. reset the breaker checked it out everything fine. told her there you go problem solved. she asks ok how you reset breaker? so we tell her it was in the tripped position . so she asks ok i go all the way to the left then all the way to the right when it does that? we say yes. she then asks so thats all the way left then all the way right? ten times in a round.then as we are leaving she asks another dozen times all the way left then all the way right?

oldman

i've discovered in my time, that the service calls are fine...it's the customers who are crazy

MDShunk

Had one right before lunch today for a kitchen light. It needed a new lamp. When I told the man that the light bulb was just burned out, he replied, "Yeah, that's what I figured". I continue to be amazed by the number of homeowners who call an electrician for a burned out lamp. It's got to be at least a dozen times a year for me. Granted, some of them are tough to access fixtures, and that's why they call. Not today... just used the step stool the guy had in the kitchen.

brian john

I was on a contract job today, had to fit the customer in due the their delay in hiring us and jtheir ob dead line.

I had to test 17 circuit breakers, megger all feeders, megger the switchboard and perform a earth/ground resistance test. We were in the middle of testing the CB's when the electrical foreman came to us because the power was off, we explained we were doing 2-CBs at a time to speed up OUR process, minimizing down time for them by pulling several CBs at a time, so the Main only need to be open for short periods, CB's in CB's out.

Normally our testing should be done PRIOR to energizing the switchboard, so testing coordination was costing ME, and I was trying to work with the customers outage concerns without loosing time.

Anyway the electrical foreman tells me I am a crook ripping his boss off with BS testing that means nothing. So I politely tried to explain why testing is important, how testing can avoid problems, it is in the job specs and has to be done and normally my price is calculated into the overall job bid. No apology, no sorry I trashed your work, just a YEAH RIGHT.

Now If I came on his job and told him he did trash work, that was not worthy of a slacker 1 month helper, do you think he would be upset?
But he did not have the common sense to realize he had insulted my workers and me, plus totally trashed my profession.

MDShunk

So they were getting pre-commissioning testing after they already energized the gear? Nice.

oldman

maybe the foreman was right in this case...since it's already operating

MDShunk

I don't think so. I don't know at what voltage this equipment was operating at, but it would take some serious balls (for lack of a better term) for a guy to just switch on some gear that hasn't been megged out yet.

Brian, is your testing ever holding up anyone's cut-in card? Or do your POCO's just get their cut-in authorization from the code inspector only? Around my parts, anything over 480 at 1000 amps needs dual code inspector sign-off and test guy sign off to get the cut-in card sent in. Even at that, there's usually a party of POCO engineers and linemen giving your main cabinet the old hairy eyeball.