Frugal and Energy Efficient Living

I worked on such for years and often told people that it wasn't going to be cancer or a heart attack that will do me in but what a homeowner did to their heating system or water heater that will kill me.

One homeowner had put in his own furnace and had run new wiring to the furnce from his circuit breaker panel and for some reason made the white wire the hot wire but hooked up the black wire to the fuzed disconnect on the furnace. I found out about that the hard way.

Another guy bypassed the fuze and swtch in the fused disconnect on the furnace which made it a junction box but silly me, I assumed it was still a fused disconnect when I started working on the furnace.

A customer called me up and said his carbon monoxide in his basement was going off every so often. I went over there and quickly narrowed down the problem to the water heater he recently installed himself being natural gas altough he had LP gas and it was sooted up to the point the flue was blocked.

In order to save money on fuses which kept blowing on his furnace, a homeowner decided to put in a 30 amp fuze instead of the 20 amps that kept blowing. The good news for him was that his 30 amp fuse was good but the bad news was that it cost him a chunk for me to replace the burnt wiring and electrical controls on his furnace.