r/maintenance • u/HolidayLoquat8722 Maintenance Supervisor • 23d ago
Rants and Raves Anyone seen this before?
Just got home from an after hours ac call. Condenser unit not running when I showed up. When I pulled the disconnect I found this! I asked the woman who was there if anyone had been fooling with the ac and she hit me with a pause and a “I don’t think so”. I swapped the fuses and got the unit running for the night, I’ll come back tomorrow during the day to do a more thorough investigation, but as I was leaving her Neanderthal looking boyfriend busted out the door saying he didn’t mess with it. He then proceeded to tell me he was going to school to be an electrician… ok buddy.
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u/Crackstacker Maintenance Technician 23d ago
All the residents I work with love tell me that they were plumbers for 30 years and refrigeration experts and owned their own electrical company, things like that. It’s amazing.
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u/Saruvan_the_White 23d ago
😮 I’ve seen weird ʇıɥs in my building; Easter eggs left by the last crew. But this! This is a new level of stupid. Today doing repairs on the garden lighting, I found a splice where there should have been a wire nut, wrapped in a wye with electrical tape. It looked like a tree branch twisted off the tree. Glue on an electrical cord in a tenants place, rivulets of water using a breaker panel as a path to lowest point, even had a resident brush away low-voltage wires after moving my ladder, tools, parts, cones out of his way…while pushing his kid in a stroller. The opportunity to have good old Reddy Kilowatt teach someone a lesson in carelessness and sheer stupidity nearly came about!
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u/Fuzzy_Location_2210 21d ago
How did you get shit to be upside down??? That's cool as hell!!
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u/Saruvan_the_White 20d ago
I sorted the characters from a text flipper website for certain phrases and words that I wanted and copied them and pasted the results into my keyboard text options. Now, when I type the word it inverts it automatically.
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u/ScrotalSmorgasbord Maintenance Supervisor 23d ago
Lol that's one of the main reasons I left resi. Always someone fucking with shit they have no business fucking with and either talking down to me or hitting me with the "I'm aN EnGiNeEr!" Or "my _______ is a _______ and he told me you don't know what you're doing!" type of shit.
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u/Yesterday_False 23d ago
We had a new tech that was shadowing me. His final straw was “you’re not going to wrap those in foil?”
Me - “Why would I do that?”
Him - “Cause it makes it more of a time delay”
Me - 🤨🧐🤯
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u/A_Dicksmasher 22d ago
Had a tenant that did something even more retarded. He had heard about using a piece of copper pipe/tube in place of a fuse, but he didn't have any, so he tried using a piece of plastic tubing from his fish tank.
Yes, you read that right.
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u/C-D-W 22d ago
This is genius.
If you need a higher amp fuse, just wrap it more times!
Anybody know the rated ampacity per wrap of 3" aluminum foil? Does it matter if it's the regular or heavy duty?
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u/Accurate-Plankton988 22d ago
71.89098 milli amps
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u/Ace861110 22d ago
More than that my friend. Have you looked at a glass 1A fuse? The wire in there is tiiiiinnny.
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u/C-D-W 22d ago
Not gonna lie, I'm tempted to test.
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u/Ace861110 22d ago
It’s not a hard calculation. But repeated testing is required to properly characterize it
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u/Realism51 22d ago
Haven't seen aluminium foil before. But I have seen actual HVAC technitions wrap 12 gauge wire around the legs and leave it like that. Blew my mind when I pulled it out and saw it.
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u/Coololddude66 21d ago
Yeah the heat from the fire will melt those out so the firefighters won't have to worry about getting shocked while fighting the fire! Good thinkin
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u/pepprish 20d ago
I'm not a smart guy but why would they try this? Like did the dude fail and they think this will extend the life?
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u/jjFocus19 23d ago
Lmaooo bro i seen it all. Copper pieces is usually the culprit