Fun with Electricity

It's pretty obvious an amateur handyman lived here before us - there are a lot of things of shall we say do-it-yourself quality.  Over time, some of these items will likely find their way onto the blog.  In this entry we felt we'd share a few anecdotes about the configuration of the house's electrical system.

The breaker box is not only messy, but also completely labeled in a fashion best described as 'false'. There are two breakers labeled "Washer". When we had to turn off the circuit the washer was actually connected to, it remained powered up with both of those breakers open; neither of them were correct. We have to figure out which breaker connects to which circuit, and then probably clean up the wiring.  There are a number of circuits which don't actually connect to anything anymore - those would be logical places to start.

OK, so this isn't amateur, but can someone tell me what it is?  I'm not certain if it is power or like an old phone line or something but I'm pretty sure I don't need one in my living room. 

Finally, we have an epic tale of frustration and confusion centered around our water softener. We have a fairly old water softener that came with the house, which is good because the water here is quite hard, but it also predates the age of manuals being on the internet and the like.  It didn't seem to be working right, so we called a guy to come out and take a look at it and show us how to actually operate it. Aside from being old, he pronounced the device in perfect health.

After that, we'd hoped that everything would be peachy in the hard water department.  However, a few days later we started getting the white residue on our dishes that is typical of hard water again.  We looked in the salt bin and it was pretty apparent it wasn't actually using any appreciable quantity of salt.  It made all the right sounds and the gears of the clock turned on their own, etc, so we really couldn't figure it out.  We also adjusted the settings a few times thinking that maybe that was the problem, though when we did the math the original settings were pretty reasonable.  This went on for maybe a month or six weeks.  We manually initiated cycles every couple of days, which seemed to work.

Eventually, Ana was coming up the stairs after once again manually re-setting the clock and cycle, and realized that when she turned off the basement light, the water softener shut off. Apparently, they had the softener on the same circuit as the lights. The water softener is now working fine.  Our temporary solution has been simply to only screw in the bulb when we want light down there, and there are a number of other things that need permanent fixes before we get to that.

My question is, did the previous owners unscrew the light bulb for the past 15 or so years they've had that softener, only turn it on when they wanted it to work, did they just not realize it wasn't running?  The world may never know.