... when I first started posting on this forum... my entire apartment was, somehow, on one fuse, except for a single outlet. There were plenty of fuses in the box, and, at the time, they all seemed to have wires attached, but only two did anything.

The whole building was full of snafus. Original wiring was knob&tube, but someone had "remodeled" and tacked romex onto it to drop to the outlets, leaving ground detached. Then along came the Section-8 people and their "inspections", which consisted of plugging in one of those three-LED outlet testers to verify proper wiring. Well some landlord/handyman or another figured out he could trick the testers by tying the ground prong to neutral... Problem was, in my kitchen, the first guy, the romex-tied-to-the-k&t guy, got neutral/hot reversed, so the second guy actually tied the ground prong to hot. Imagine my surprise when I slid the microwave over one day to clean under it, and the side came in contact with the kitchen sink...

When I moved in, the local power company told me on the phone, "that apartment hasn't had power in over a year, so we can't hook it back up until we inspect it." I said "hell no. Once you inspect it, you'll NEVER hook it up again."

I ended up giving the phone to the landlord, who disappeared into his apartment (across the hall) for about 10 minutes. I have no idea what he said, but two days later I came home and my power was on.

Come to think of it, I never got a bill either, so the landlord may very well have turned it on himself.

Anyway...

{{!gwi}}