OK. I'm a dolt.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My bedroom has a ceiling fan with lights in it. On the wall is one of those combo fan contol/light dimmer controls.

One day, many months ago, the lights on the fan stopped working. Great, thinks I, the wall control has died. I mean, really, how likely is it that all four bulbs burnt out at the same time?

So, I add “replace fan control” to my honey-do list and it starts to age. I really dont want to mess with the house wiring because it’s a bit of an unlabeled mess.

The other day, we’re at Home Despot and I think of the fan and I finally buy a new control. $25 dollars! Holy Cow! Luxor thinks these things are wonderful.

This past Sunday, my wife decides to go out with friends for lunch. I know, from past lunches, that this is really and all-day thing that usually includes a craft-store run, too. I feel guilty sitting down to a couple movies and popcorn without knocking at least one thing off my honey-do list first.

I decide that today is the day for the upstairs light and I grab the new control and head upstairs. It took about 6 trips up and down the stairs to find the right breaker for the light and another 3 for two different screwdrivers, dikes, & electrical tape,.

Finally, I get the new control installed and I turn the breaker on and nothing happens. Nothing happens? Is it really possible I burnt out four light bulbs at the same time? Well, perhaps, maybe a surge could do it. I go down (again) and get a light bulb. That doesn’t work either.

One more trip down and I get my voltmeter. The voltmeter says there’s juice on the fan side of th switch (interestingly, the voltmeter doesn’t show lower voltages when I slide the dimmer- it must be sensitive to peak values rather than the average voltage that results from a modern dimmer’s wave-chomping methods).

I go down again for chair to stand on. I start disassembling the fan housing where it attaches to the ceiling - time to check the voltage there. I get the upper housing off and expose the wires. I try to fit the voltmeter leads in but I need another hand. I’ve got to hold the two probes and hold the voltmeter body, too. I try balancing the voltmeter on a fan blade but that doesn’t work. Maybe, says I, if I wrap the decorative chain that hangs from the fan around the voltmeter handle.

I feed the ceramic hummingbird through the handle and make a loop. The voltmeter drops, pulls on the chain, and the light comes on.

The light comes on!

sigh

The lights were out for months and months and months because the light switch on the fan was off.

Yup - I’m a dolt. I couldn’t help it either, I had to let my wife know later how much a dolt I was. I couldn’ve stayed silent and just basked in the glory of being Mr. Fix-it man but that just seemed dishonest.

2

I knew where the story was going by the second sentence.

I can relate; I once took my car dash apart to replace the hamster cage blower. Then I realized that the switch was off. How I missed that I have absolutely no clue. My only defense is that I always left that switch in the same position and somebody else driving the card had turned it off.

3

Heh!

Is the new switch at least more awesome than the old switch?

4

It’s identical - apparently there’s only so much you can do with a dual-control switch (though they did have an all-digital version for $45, I think).

5

Cheer up dude. I recently had to revise my light fixing process to include double checking that the bulb is not burned out. Cripes.

6

Would you believe I have a fat orange cat who likes to jump from the bed at the ceiling fan hangy pull things, and sometimes manages to turn it off? And that I have replaced the light bulb no less than three times when it was just the cord that was off? Because a tumpity fattles McKitty pulled on it?

7

So you’ve come in here to share this with us to avoid having to tell Mrs Belrix?

I can certainly sympathize. I’ve done things equally boneheaded in the past. Fortunately memory suppression is at optimal performance so I can’t recall any specifics at the moment.

8

Nah - I told her…

I had to do something to explain the big bruise I gave myself on the forehead from doing this :smack: repeatedly.

9

I know the feeling…

Last summer after waking up late in the afternoon following a night shift, my wife informed me the oven wouldn’t turn on. I grab my meter, pull out the stove and start checking things…fuses good, breaker good, hmm…start ohming the element, check the relays, check the thermostat, everything looks OK. I tell myself I must be missing something, plug everything back in and try it. Nope, oven still won’t turn on. Bah! I recheck everything, recheck the connections. I start jumping out the controls one at a time, everything works except the output from the main controller is not coming on. I find it hard to believe it suddenly failed. I spent over an hour on it, trying to find a cause. Finally I decided it must be the main board, crap!!

I was getting frustrated and decided to put everything back together. After plugging it back in the time on the display was blinking, so I reset it and everything turned on. What th…? Turns out the power had gone out and that disables the oven as a safety feature, the way you reset it is by setting the time. All that work and all I had to do was reset the friggin’ clock. Yeah, I did a lot of head-smacking after that one. My wife was heckling me too, “…and you’re paid to fix machines, hahahah!”

10

My husband is self employed and does home improvement stuff. One of his clients had him come and replace a ceiling fan for him - the old one was a really really nice one - remote control, five lights, white, the thing had to have been worth a couple hundred. The reason he had him replace it is because the remote wasn’t working anymore (it was mounted on a really high ceiling) and he was replacing it. He had already tried replacing the batteries - it just wouldn’t work.

So husband takes the fan home and thinks - wow, this would look great in our bedroom. The one we had in there had no light, and was older. He takes the remote, opens the back of battery case, takes a look at the fan as he’s taking it apart to install it, and notices that the little switches in the remote are NOT set at the same points that the little switches in the fan were. He made them the same, and voila, almost brand spanking new fan with a remote that works.

The client, when he went to change the battery in the remote, had hit one of the switches throwing off the fan and the remote. :smiley:

He shoots, he scores!! And the fan kicks ass!

11

I once took the entire front of my engine off ('71 Mustang) to get to the timing chain - only to find out the timing chain was fine. The turned out the distributor was slipping causing it to go out of proper timing. Tightening the distributor fixed the issue.

12

I also knew where this was going at the second sentence. Because that is exactly what I would do myself.

Once my 2 year old daughter got ahold of my glasses and twisted the frames all to hell. I got some pliers and twisted them back, then put them on to see how they fit. When I put them on everything looked blurry. “What could she possibly have done to make things look blurry?” I asked myself over and over. “Did she reverse the lenses?” No, she’s two. “Are they upside down?” Of course not, she just twisted the frames. Put them on- blurry. Take them off- clear. For half an hour I tried to figure out what she had done to them.

I was wearing my contacts.

13

I had an outlet in my condo that didn’t work. The breaker was on, but I wasn’t getting any power out of it. I just made do with the other outlets. For years. Then one day I thought “what does that wall switch do? It doesn’t seem to be hooked up to anything”. Maybe a year later I put two and two together and turned on the outlet.

14

I lived in my first house for nearly a year before I accidentally discovered that the mysterious light switch on the kitchen wall near the back door actually turned on the lights in the detatched garage.

Only discovered it because I flipped the switch one day, and that night looked out the kitchen window and noticed that the garage lights were on.

15

None if my friends around here know of this as I’ve kept it a secret. But - here goes.

I’ve got a vacation cabin up in the San Juan that gets its hot water via a Paloma tankless water heater. After using the original for around 25 years it finally died, and, as it had given such good service, I ordered the identical model as replacement (Yes, Paloma still made the exact same model). As I’m getting a bit along in years, and as R&R of the heater is a lousy chore, I decided to have a local plumber install it, which he did while I was back on shore - not there to watch him. This was about a year ago.

Anyway, on returning to the cabin, I turned on the Paloma, and it worked; but the water coming out was at least 190°F. Really steaming. There is a control on the heater that allows you to change the temperature of the water, which I turned down. Then, the Paloma wouldn’t put out any hot water. I kept turning it back up until it was almost on blast furnace, and it came back on. Couldn’t figure this one out, so on returning to shore, placed a message on their help service stating the above and asking basically WTF. Got back a lot of advice mainly involving removing the heater and back-flushing. Did I mention that R&R was a miserable chore? So several months went by with scalding water available, but not much else. Made showers rather interesting.

I then called their help desk and talked to a real human. No help except R&R.

Finally, last week, I was out to the cabin again and for the first time actually noticed a water valve on the intake (cold water) side of the heater. (I had installed this valve myself years ago during the original installation but had forgotten about it.) And this time I had a FLASH of inspiration, and grabbed the valve handle and cranked it hard counterclockwise. Wonder of wonders, the handle started turning, and kept going for two or three full turns. And, the Paloma now works perfectly. The plumber had evidently turned off the valve when he removed to old heater, and opened it only a smidge when the new was installed. So I’ve been fighting with that thing for a year now when the only problem was that the poor thing was starved for F**king water.

16

Belrix, you can make a bigger fool of yourself with a ceiling fan. Much bigger. Trust me.