Today is Diwali but I have already written enough about that. Today I only want to make a quick note that I was scolded by an Indian electrician for attempting to fix something myself. This naturally makes me feel proud as a true American.
This morning when the electricity was still not back on and the fridge was rapidly making an unscheduled defrost, I decided to poke around and see if I couldn’t find the problem. I knew the problem was probably simply the breakers and in America it would be a simple matter of looking for which switches were red and flipping them back. But of course here the technology is a little behind. At least in this apartment it is and everything still uses the old breaker system. For any who don’t know already, a breaker is simply a small copper wire strung between two points, when there is too big of a surge the wire breaks. Given this it still didn’t seem like to big deal to find and fix the problem on my own. The problem was there are three different sets of breaker boxes all containing numerous breakers, none of which are identify, and all of which look like they should have been replaced a long time ago. The wires on all of them didn’t look like anything that I would trust and I couldn’t find any that were obviously broken. So the general hypothesis between the two halves of my brain was that one of the wires was simply too corroded or wasn’t making good enough contact. This means that I had to test them all by replacing them one by one. To make matters worse I didn’t have any wire to use to replace the old wire. I did eventually find one breaker where the wire was obviously broken and stripped some wires from a computer part I wasn’t using to replace the broken wire. When I had fixed this wire and replaced the breaker electricity came on for everyone in the building EXCEPT ME. At this point one of my neighbors walked by and asked what I was doing. After discussing the situation with him, he said he would try to find an electrician and entice him to come even on a holiday by offering him a little extra.
The electrician showed up and warned me that Indian current is 220 (which I knew) instead of the American 110 (which I also knew) and that I shouldn’t be messing around with it. But when he saw the breaker I had fixed he said it was a good job and the wire was perfectly fine for the job. One point for the good old American do it yourselfer. After that he found a breaker box that I hadn’t even known about where there two breakers that had not only burst but had done it with some force leaving copper stains all over the casing. Both of these breakers naturally were only for my apartment. After that he found a point where the main wire itself running to emmy/em apartment had broken from an electric surge. This obviously was making it difficult for the electrons to run in proper circuit (yes I know it is alternating current and they don’t actually run in a circuit let’s just go with it).
Now however, I have a much better idea where all the breakers are and where to look for problems next time. The electrician also left behind some wire. By the way the bill for the electrician even including the “extra” that was promised because it was Diwali came out to 900 INR, or $18 USD by current exchange rates. Enjoy your week.
_Matthew