Decided to start posting in this section after a long time.
Didn't know where to start.
Will probably look back in a day or two and wonder what was on my mind for doing it but here it is anyway.
You simply cant mess with electricity to much extent without some sort of test equipment.
A good meter is a must.
At the very least a voltage tester to see if a circuit is energized or not.
I use mine for everything.
I am a professional so I have to have the best I can get, my life and work depend on it.
I own a Fluke meter and it is all I will ever own.
My last one worked for 20 years before it just fell apart from old age.
The rest of the young guys at work have what I would call cheap ones.
The electricians have cheap ones.
They look at my fluke in awe and wonder how I can afford one.
They pay 40 dollars for a meter where I will pay 250 dollars or so for a kit that comes with a pouch another amp tester and a nice strap with a super magnet on it to hang it from places.
Also nice leads.
I have seen the cheap meters last from 6 months to maybe a year.
They make fun of me sometimes for spending the money I spend on a meter.'
They say but mine only costs 40 dollars.
I say and yest you end up buying one every year or more.
Mine will last a very long time my last one 20 years.
At today's prices at that rate you will have payed 800 dollars or more for meters.
The other thing is they pay so little for them they dont care if they break or lose them.
I on the other hand will go ballistic if someone mishandle my meter.
One guy got his cheap meter stolen and hasn't replaced it.
He is a foreman on the job.
He needs a meter.
I went there to help him on the job and he had the audacity to ask if I would leave my meter and toner there so he could use them.
I didn't catch myself and replied are you $%^%$ kidding me, laughed and said go buy your own meter and got in my truck.
It isn't like they dont make the money they just dont have their priorities right.
They will come to work on a Monday and brag about wasting money on some rot and not buy the tools including meters to work with.
Years ago my old company supplied meters but with today's workers not giving a hoot about another mans tools I dont blame them for not.
I worked union electrician for awhile and they required you to have tools.
They had a list, the higher up you were the more tools you had to have.
Not one time did they require you to have power tools the company supplied them.
So anyway I think you all get the point and my speech is over.
Soon I will dedicate this section to meters and the use of them because I have had one hell of a time getting folks to use them right.
Even that foreman that wanted to use mine.

The next thing I am going to post is a very good video on electricity.
When I was a kid even in grade school my room used to have all manner of strange smells the occasional fire and lord knows what coming out of it from experiments.
My bedroom had wires strung out everywhere.

I never scrimp on quality tools, they pay for themselves over the years !

I still have an old Simpson 260 meter I used when I was in the Navy, its the ole analog style. not as quick as the newer ones these days but you cant beat the accuracy

The Simpsons are still used on the bench a lot.
One thing I found out with the auto range on the Flukes and others is testing for a resistor at the end of a pair of wires.
Our speaker circuits have a shield and a drain wire in them.
This is to capture and eliminate noise on the speaker.
Many times the induced voltage on that wire will mess up reading for that resistor on auto range.
So I have to put it on manual and the resistor will show up.
I have ran across several people that thought their meter was broken or were looking for a break in the wire because they couldn't read the resistor.
What is worse the closer you get to the end of line resistor it will start to show up.
Then you are chasing a ghost trying to find something that isn't there.
It happened to me because someone put the wires for the circuits on the wrong contact screws on the amplifier.
That was the trouble not the resistor.
I didn't know it until I got to looking at the installation terminal chart.
The resistor is there to supervise the circuit so if the line has an open the amplifier will go into trouble.
This is for fire alarm voice evacuation and is part of the code.
About the time they were ready to take the thing down and get another one the troubles went away.
What did you do they asked.
I put the wires on the right terminals.
WHAT????
Yeah you landed the wires on the A side not the B side.
The A side is for if you want to run the wires back to the amplifier for a class A circuit with no resistor at the end.
4 hours in the middle of the night looking for nothing, a so called snipe hunt.

Someone sent me this picture yesterday.
This is an example of no one having any idea what they are doing.
The white wire on the bottom doesn't belong there.
The wires on top you only need the red wire.
They have left no place for our control wire at all.
To make it worse these people are in charge.
None of them have a meter and have no idea how to use it if they did.
The head electrician did the top wires.

I have this young lady working with me from another office.
She's married has two kids and is around 30.
Not much knowledge on electrical things but is a sponge to learn.
She's using the meter but doesn't know what some of the stuff is on it or what it's for.
I ask her if she knew what alternating current was and she didn't.
Most people don't these days.
I explained to her how it alternates between positive and negative at a certain frequency.
She didn't know what frequency was.
This is also common with people these days.
I asked her how often she went to the grocery store.
She said once a week.
I said she had a frequency of one because that's how often the frequented the store.
I then told her frequency was measured in hertz.
That our frequency in the US was 60 hertz and it was measured by how many times the current changed from positive to negative.
60 times a second.
I asked her if she had ever seen this before and she said no.
I told her that she had and didn't know it.
How she asked.
I said because your eyes saw it you brain stored the information but you just don't realize it.
Now she's flabbergasted.
I said it's everywhere on your job you just don't pay it any attention.
Where can I see it.
Look at that door to the panel.
She picked it up and cried out there it is right in front of me.
120 VAC 60 Hz.
Out of all the guys I've had working around me she's about the only person that shows any interest in learning this stuff.

The biggest change I would suggest to the American (only because I don't really care about other countries systems) School Systems is that not every kid cares about most of what is taught past the eighth grade. We need to have technical schools teaching the trades for those kids...both male and female. Math and science pertaining to electricity, carpentry, plumbing, electronics, mechanics and all the rest would still be a requirement. Communication skills, too. What is necessary is hands on training in each trade. That would get us back on track in a hurry. Drop out rates and unemployment would plummet. College is great for those who head that direction, but flipping hamburgers, while essential, is most likely not going to be sustainable.

I I were to do it over again I would give up my 8 years of post high school education for a couple years of learning to be an electrician or a computer programmer or IT technician. Sure, I did OK with my college degrees but most of my jobs required what I could have gotten from tech school.

More emphasis on the trades and less on traditional classroom studies.

I was also bending conduit and told her about the 30° 60° 90° triangle and how I used it in bending conduit and how I used it on my lathe.
She wrote it down on her phone to study later.
Nobody has ever done that before.
The long leg or hypotenuse is always twice as long as the short leg of the triangle.
By doing this you can make a mark and another mark twice the distance you want an offset and bend both ones at 30 degrees opposite directions from each other.
The result will be an offset half the distance between both marks.
2 inches apart will give you a one inch offset.
At 15 it doubles again so it would be a 1/2 offset at 2 inches apart.

On a lathe you can make the compound slide move in towards the work half the distance the numbers on the dial indicate or 1/4 the distance if set at 15.
I absolutely love this stuff but my school didn't teach anything of interest to me in the real world so I thought it was boring.
They did have basic electricity in grade school and I enjoyed it.
What happened to encyclopedias I lived in those things growing up.

matereater wrote: ↑Sun Feb 16, 2020 7:56 am I still have an old Simpson 260 meter I used when I was in the Navy, its the ole analog style. not as quick as the newer ones these days but you cant beat the accuracy

Same for me, I have several Simpsons that I bought in the early 70's. One old Fluke and a couple of clip-ons. All work great. I have served 3 IBEW apprenticeships, in the Marines, Atomic Plant and IC railroad. Young and foolish back then, would change jobs at the drop of a hat. All my knowledge is, like me, now obsolete. The companies didn't mind, they were getting a skilled electrician for less money.