If you thought that the egyptian Curse of the Pharaoh was bad enough, you should really try to fix the cabling of my house. I wrote about the cabling before. I said that to cable two outlets that are, in sight, about at 3 metres distance, I had to use more than 5 metres of cable.
Well, this time to connect two boxes that are in the middle of two connected walls in a 4×3 metres room, I had to use, again, almost five metres of cable. Math would tell me I’d need 3.5 metres. And similarly, between a box and an outlet that are in line, I need almost twice the cable as I’d need to pass them outside the tubes..
It also turned out that two of the sockets were broken. And that actually scares me as the plastic was cracked open, which ain’t good at all, especially considering I bought these not six years ago, and wired them myself, so I’m pretty sure they work. Add to that the “discovery” that one of the universal sockets I used in the office is white… while all the rest of the outlets are dark grey with black cover.
Up to now it was covered by one of the desks so it didn’t matter, but it will matter soon as none of the sockets will be covered when the new furniture is in. Luckily, I know where I can make use of the white socket (downstair in the entrance), so I just have to replace it. This brings the list of stuff to buy up to two simple sockets and one universal socket, Vimar Idea, dark grey. It’s about €20 just for those. But it’s not done yet!
I also found out that the 2.5mm cable, which I use to cable outlets, is barely enough to cable the outlet near the light switch, and that all the cables used in this room are 0.75mm.
And it gets worse, the light switch itself was, again, wired on the return of the fixture, rather than on the phase. If I used LED lights here I would have had the same problem I had before in my bedroom which I solved by putting the switch on the phase. So I decided to fix that too, getting rid of the two cables that were there “extra” (there were two-way switches in this room a long time ago). I also removed the buzzer cables, that were dead cables now, as I removed that too.
The result is quite nice up to now, a lot less cable inside the wall, although I’ll have to bring three new cables around for the outlets. Ah yeah I didn’t say that yet. All the outlets were connected to the phase of the light, with the exception of the one by the door. The reason for this is probably because the tube in the wall was almost full already, and the “technicians” who prepared the cabling the first time found it easier to re-use that. Lovely, isn’t it?
I also removed the antenna cable. We’re switching to sat here, and I found that I never watch anything on my office anymore – I stopped using it as a living room myself, if I want to watch TV or DVDs I go to my bedroom where the TV (and the PS3 😉 ) is.
Anyway, at least I was able to connect the light with a 1mm cable (which should be enough considering I’m not going to use either incandescent or halogen light here), without two-way switches, and making sure that the lights phase is only used for the light. To power up the laptop and the hard-disk (where the music is, as well as my job’s data), I simply took a longer cable to connect to my mother’s bedroom’s socket.
I’ll probably proceed this way until next week, when I can finally go to the shop to buy the parts I need: the three sockets, some 30 metres of 1.5mm wire (10 metres I finished in three years and I didn’t do that much work lately!) and some insulators to wire together the cables (not sure how they are called in English; I should probably learn how all these terms are translated, as it might really make a difference to me).