Second, no, I wasn’t hurt, thanks for asking.
Third, take a guess.
Okay, so here’s what happened.
At my work we have reach in coolers. They’re the coolers or freezers you see at grocery stores (usually with doors) that you reach into to grab stuff out of. Here’s a picture for reference. See that greyish strip near the bottom, just under the green part. It’s a kind of bumper so your shopping cart doesn’t bash up the metal and paint. That’s the part in question. It comes off to reveal an electrical chase (see where I’m going with this) with about 8 million wires and some plumbing. I’ve popped that panel off probably a hundred times, no big deal. Take out the screws, smack it with my foot and it falls to the floor with a big loud noise that startles all the customers. Here’s a 5 year old thread with a bad picture of what’s back there AND it actually relates to this thread in a roundabout way. Here’s a footnote*, I’ll come back to that at the end.
Anyways, I take off the screws holding the kickplate on, smack it with my foot and, my god, I’ve never seen such a bright spark (and it’s not my first time shorting something). It was like accidentally watching someone weld. Before that thing hit the ground I thought:
1)I’m glad I kicked it and didn’t do it with my hand.
2)What the hell was that?
3)Broke something?
4)Shit, I’m going to have to deal with that before I continue on with the main project.
5)Gonna have to grab a meter, trace the wire, figure out which breaker it was if it didn’t pop it on it’s own, splice in a new section of wire, reset the breaker and hope whatever I did didn’t wreck something else in the process.
Then, about 2 seconds later I watched as all the fans in the entire unit spun down. That made that a lot easier.
As you can probably guess, the screw caught a wire that was sticking out a bit too far, cut through it, grounded it, shorted it, made a giant spark and popped the breaker. A co-worker said he couldn’t believe how calm I was when it happened, but as I like to say “I fix shit”. There’s very few things that can go wrong that get me worried. I can’t build to save my life, but I can fix. Besides, as soon as I saw the fans spin down I knew I was in the clear. Check the wire, it was just a knick. Taped it up, reset the breaker, tucked the wire back in and I was good to go.
Back to the tiling project that I was actually doing.
*As for how this is related to that old thread. Originally, I was thinking it was just related because when that old heater died, the cooler and freezer back up with water and very slowly dripped water onto the tile floor (must be an over flow hole somewhere) and a few tiles popped up. Over time, the nearby tiles popped up as well and I was just now getting around to repairing them. Oddly, I’m pretty sure the wire I cut through was the heater wire that I was asking about in that thread. To be fair, a lot of work gets done down there so it’s not that a wire I installed 6 years ago is still in the same place I left it. Whoever worked down there last didn’t push it back all the way or it migrated out on it’s own.
Either way, installing some floor tiles is always more fun when you get to do surprise electrical work. It was certainly a lot more fun then grinding the old glue off the concrete, that’s for sure. I’d rather do electrical/HVAC work than tiling any day.
