SUMMARY KEYWORDS
panel, arcing, wire, breakers, electric, literally, talking, big, installed, called, homeowners insurance, fire, blister, fortunately, people, fail, electrical, andrew, house, feet
00:02
Before you start your next do it yourself project listen to this. You Got This! is on the air. You Got this! is hosted by ABT plumbing, electric heat and air owner, Andrew Twidwell and Rosalie Brown, with a helpful hand. Here are Andrew and Rosalie
00:18
This is Andrew Twidwell, owner of ABT plumbing electric heat and air, here once again with the show, You Got This! the show of DIY do’s and don’ts. And I’m zooming in here from our Auburn office with Rosalie who’s down in LA. And yeah, a lot has been going on lately. So we’re just talking about what are we going to talk about? We had a list of things, or at least a lot to be going on in your life. Right.
00:39
Wow. I mean, your life is really exciting, too. But um, I did go somewhere I never imagined going. I went to Texas, which is interesting.
00:55
You went to the Gulf of Texas. You did I went to the Gulf.
00:59
And so that was interesting. And yeah. And I basically have never in my life had Sun poisoning that I’m aware of. But apparently that’s what happened to my feet. So it just became recently. I mean, I’ve been back for about a week and a weekend a couple days now. And I just was able to put on shoots. So
01:22
Oh, geez. Did they blister? Well, the funny thing
01:25
is you think that they will blister but no, they just Craziest thing. It was like I thought I had a poison reaction or something like something wasn’t right. And my feet swelled up when I was there. And then when you fly, that’s not a good thing. So So the funny thing about this whole Oh, I mean, I laugh I laugh or I cry. So I had this big on the on the trip on the return trip, right. That’s where it matters because you’re coming back to your your dog’s life. Your home your job. I was a kid. Yeah, right. So I’m getting ready to return to California and I had a three hour layover. You know, you got to fly Corpus Christi to Dallas and then Dallas to Burbank. And so Okay, great. So there I have three hours layover in Dallas and like fantastic. That airport is enormous. There’s going to be anything I could possibly want to eat or drink. Lies. So was it all shut down? Or was it No, I was shut down. So Corpus Christi decided that there was a lot of weather. And so we couldn’t let any planes leak. So my three hour layover turned into okay, if you’re lucky and your plane takes off at this moment, you may have a tailwind that gets you you know, so by the time I landed in Dallas, I literally was sprinting and my feet are these disgusting meatloaves I’m sprinting through the Dallas airport and and read as I you know, come up to the gate huffing, puffing like hysterical almost, you know, I’ve been able to use the restroom haven’t been able to get any beverage haven’t been able to eat. They’re like boarding group seven. I’m in group seven. So I made my flight home. But um, honestly, Andrew, I don’t know what happened to these feet, but I won’t I’m not going to we’re friends. So I’m not going to say any photos. Okay, but um, they’re just not right. It’s been a while. We’re getting closer. Closer. But we’re not out of the woods yet. So
03:27
are you still able to get up and walk around and stuff? And yeah, wearing shoes, heavy wear flip flops or whatever? Yeah.
03:33
So there’s a couple spots where the sun did the most damage. And so those are actually unfortunately right at my feet and
03:40
you learned a really important lesson of remembering to put sunscreen on your feet.
03:44
Yeah, like or, or don’t go to the Gulf of Mexico. I
03:48
have to put sunscreen on my feet because I’ve totally done that myself. I just, you know, I got blue eyes or so it’s Yeah, I mean, everything just, I blisters on my back from Lake Tahoe when I was a teenager and as a kid, I was getting blisters and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. You can’t mess around.
04:04
Yeah, only souvenir I brought back from the Gulf. Yeah, foot.
04:08
We both been dealing with health stuff. So yeah, I’ve been dealing with I got on the cron and that kind of laid me out for two solid weeks and just barely getting back to it still feeling. Oh, no, not 100% For sure. Probably like 70 or 80%. Back in a day. 1616 now, so yeah, it’s been a it’s been a wild ride man. I did a really good job of avoiding it for two years and that finally caught up to me and got my got my guard down, went to a meeting with a bunch of people and went out with some friends afterwards for a couple beers at a restaurant in Sacramento and must have picked it up somewhere down there. That’s pretty much all I did.
04:47
It was crazy because the few times that actually, you know called you on the phone. Oh my god. I was like, Do you have nine on one on standby? I mean, you sounded
04:56
It was bad. Yeah, I was fortunate because it’s it got scary a couple time. Because yeah, I mean, I’m above that age where it’s it can be a little scary and it was never hard to breathe, but my chest was definitely heavy. It’s still a little heavy still feels like, I’ve got a little bit of weight on my chest. And yeah, yeah, it’s day 16. And that’s I should be, I should be out of this. Finally tested negative this morning. My wife still testing positive after 12 days. So it’s, it’s been a Yeah, and she was a little pissed off at me. So she’s not talking to me so much right now. COVID end you know, that Typhoid Mary but COVID End bringing her up. But fortunately, I did not pass it on any my family and Easter because I had it when on Easter Sunday. And we had Easter outside, fortunately. But I did get my mom didn’t come because she wasn’t feeling well. And she just got went to the hospital twice this month or last month. She’s not terribly old. She’s only 75. She’s still very young, but she didn’t take very good care of herself. And we hung out in her apartment for half an hour. Just chatting 45 minutes. And yeah, fortunately, I didn’t give it to her. I was my biggest fear. I was going to give her Omicron because she’s been very careful. And because yeah, it could be bad for her. I didn’t give it to my kid, or her roommate, or roommates got diabetes, so we’re a little worried about her too. So.
06:15
So I mean, honestly, like, it’s it’s just, I don’t know, I don’t know that I have talked to a lot of people that have kind of gone through it, you know, because you’re I talked to quite frequently. So most your friends that have had it or not people I talked to you on a regular basis, so to hear you kind of up and down the scale and like what you sound like and, you know, checking in, like how you go and you know, yeah, I know you’re so kind of tired. So I appreciate you showing up because I’ll tell you right now, this show is not the same without you. So
06:46
it’s so weird, too. Because like the people I talked to you like yeah, I was talking to one of the guys that worked for us and said, Yeah, I just had a stuffy nose, sore throat for three days. Like Yeah, screw you, man.
06:56
Yeah, not what you had for two weeks.
06:58
I couldn’t get out of bed for a week.
07:00
I know, You’ve been so tired and stuff. And so, so. So the first week you were out, we did a rerun of the show, because we have we’re coming up on I want to say four years of the show, believe it or not. That’s kind of weird, right? Um, and so I knew that they’d be able to rerun. So last week, the gas was fantastic. It was DD right. But I literally like the red light came on. And I was like, Wait, what am I? I’m opening the show who? So if anyone actually caught, right, like, sorry, sorry. It was kind of a big like, oh, wait, it’s my time to shine. Wait, I’m Andrew. So. So nothing is the same when you’re gone. So I’m happy that you’re stepping back. Yeah, it’s much better. Much better.
07:47
Yeah. So I’m back. I’m back at work. Yeah, we had our meeting this morning. So yeah, doing stuff. So yeah, so we gotta get show, though. So we so we’re kind of running a bunch of stuff on our electrical. So our newsletters talking about this. And we’ve got a couple of specials that have come up. And we thought we talked about zinsco panels. That’s one of those things, one of those products that we see quite a bit of here, they were sold during the 60s and 70s, and even into the 80s under the Sylvania name. And
08:18
there, these are, these are electrical, electrical, right service
08:21
main service panels. So, you know, I actually live in the house on on Quaker Hill cross I had one. At the time. I didn’t know any better. That was 20 years ago. And it’s probably hopefully it’s been replaced by No, it’s, you know, it’s already gone through a couple of homeowners now. But what are some of the things you should be looking for, and this is in scope panel. You know, what is this in scope panel is it was a panel that was Cisco established in 1943. And kind of reading off of this and was commonly commonly installed between 60s and 70s. So you know, and then up here in the Gold Country, that’s when a lot of the building was done 60s 70s 80s. So that’s when the big push was people were actually moving up here. So a lot of these houses, a lot of houses up here have these things installed. They were a decent product, they were, you know, a little bit cheaper than others. So a lot of builders use them because you’re economical. But some of the problems that were associated with them were just the way they were constructed. They use a lot of aluminum. And there was a period of time when we were using a lot of little bit of wire because it was a lot cheaper than copper. And we’ve since kind of gone away from that and only use it in certain instances. We’re not really using it to wire whole houses anymore. But some of the things that can happen with the zinsco panels is the breakers can fail to trim is one of the one of the things that can happen but one of the big things that happen is when you when you push a breaker onto the bus bar, it’s actually the thing that connects makes the electrical connection. If that connection is not tight, you can have what’s called arcing where, you know, electricity is literally jumping between air. It’s lightning. You know, it’s Lightning in a Bottle essentially. But lightning inside of your panel. So you’ve got these arcing, this arcing that can happen. arcing is hot. I mean, I’ve, you know, been doing this my whole life. And you know, we kind of joked about, you know, growing up with contractor dads and yeah, once you get in touch that’s what happens. And then oh, yeah, I got a little joke. Right? Thanks, dad. Electricity is pretty dangerous. And I’ve actually cut wires by accident use use utilizing my hot wires using wire cutters and had an arc. And it literally, it’s welding hot. I mean it melt steel, it’s so hot. So when you’re getting this arcing, it can potentially make it even worse and actually cause a fire. And we’ve actually seen multiple houses up here that have caught fire because of zinsco panels. We had one where the customer called us because their neighbor’s house burned down because of this scope panel. You know, like weeks before, they’re like, No, we’re done, you know, so we went and replaced theirs in scope panel. So some of the things you’re gonna be looking for zinsco, you can open up the the don’t open the dead plate, but just opened up the door. And you’ll see the name on or sometimes actually, the name should be on the top of say Cisco or Sylvania once you open that door and see what the color what the panel is what the breakers look like. The breakers are these weird colors. They’re orange and green. So it’s kind of they’re not black, like the majority of them. So it’s pretty obvious when you have a zinsco you can actually see the color of the breakers and know that yeah, this is something that we need to take care of. It’s, you know, there’s a lot of them out there. So if you have many things, it’s not a matter of should I replace this, you really need to replace this. It’s not a matter of if it’s going to fail, it’s really a matter of when it’s going to fail. The longer it’s in the bet more and more chance you have of this thing failing. And I mean, I don’t want to be an alarmist, but it’s all you got to do is do a Google search for Cisco panel failures and oh my god, it’s
12:10
Yeah, I know, the pictures are so many heads. No, let me ask you a question. I did read when I was kind of researching this issue. I did read that there are column owner insurance like insurance companies that will not issue homeowners insurance. opposition’s go. Have you found that to be the true Yeah, true. Yeah. Wow.
12:29
Yeah. And it’s hard enough to get insurance up here as it is cut being in a fire area. So you don’t you don’t want to have any other marks against you for getting homeowners insurance, especially if you like we’ve gone through it where we had we lost use get dropped here. So it’s one of the things Yeah, that’s a good point. And you don’t want to be in that situation where you get dropped, and all of a sudden find out that you can’t find anybody to insure you because you have this info panel. And then all of a sudden you got it’s an emergency because you got 30 days or whatever, to get it together and training homeowners insurance. And then heaven forbid, you gotta go on to the the fare plan. Oh, my gosh, that was expensive. We had to do that for a year, but fortunately got out of that. Yeah, and the risks associated with these panels, both electrical and shock with statistics showing that they fail to function properly. Almost 25% of the time. Yeah, that’s a pretty big odds. I mean, if if I was going to that I’m not a gambling man, so I can’t really.
13:33
So if I were gonna go into the Gulf of Mexico, you ever again, and there’s a 25% chance a shark would eat me? Do you think I would run that risk? Like I probably would keep myself on the shore? Correct. I mean, so yeah. 25% is like a huge that is really big when you’re talking about something that would be a catastrophe for you, you know?
13:51
Yeah, I mean, I mean, what they what they mean by failure is the breaker is not tripping when it should. So what why do we have circuit breakers, the circuit breaker is there to trip if there’s a short and the system, or if there’s an overload, both those things will produce heat and potentially all electric to you. But the heat is what really can get you so it fails, things get hot fires happen, that’s why we get electrical fires. The other thing that can happen is the arcing to the bus bar starts to arc between the breaker and and the bus bar. And we’ve literally seen that we’ll go in and all my electricians have like an HVAC guys at all actually are all our technicians now have the little non non touch thermal thermometers and you can really see the heat that these things are producing. Yes, it’s shocking. It’s nasty stuff. So that’s one thing to take take a look at you your house because you definitely don’t if you get as this go panel, just get rid of it. Just do it now. If you think about it, don’t wait in I’ll tell you right now things are not getting cheaper, right? Everybody knows. And you know, especially when we’re dealing with commodities, like copper and metals and things, things are just getting more and more expensive every day, it seems.
15:11
I’m gonna ask a loaded question, because I know that it probably has a lot of factors that go into it. But let’s say that I were to discover in my, you know, three bedroom, two bath small ranch house, right? That, you know, in fact, I probably had a zinsco panel when I lived on Boehner mountain, I think that’s not a thing about anyway, what what would meet upgrading that electrical panel financially about? Do you know, like, kind of what the range might be to do that?
15:42
Fortunately, I don’t I hate to say that that’s something I should have probably figured out. But it’s not something I deal with on a daily basis any longer. So I don’t know,
15:53
I kind of go into making that quote that assessment, would it be that
15:57
it’s a fairly big process, because of the fact that you’ve got to get PGD to come in and drop the lines and rehook things up? permitting and all that stuff. So you know, it’s, it’s not a quick job. And there’s a lot of people that you have to kind of orchestrate, to work together. And being in Nevada County and dealing with PG and E, as of late has not been easy. And Placer County just because of all the fires and stuff, and then also dealing with the county or the city has also been a little difficult because they’re kind of swamped. And with COVID, and stuff, it’s it’s been, it’s been kind of crazy. So anyway, there’s a lot, it’s a lot. It’s a lot of moving parts to get it together to actually install a panel. But you’re not talking 10s of 1000s of dollars, it’s definitely you know, it’s under 10 grand. Yeah, and then the big number, but surely, it’s 1000s. It’s not, it’s not 10s of 1000s.
16:54
But the price would also like the the quote would also involve like, the square footage of your house, how much amperage like what your I mean, there’s
17:01
what you need, what your loads are, because it really depends, like, you know, a lot when these were being installed, the majority of the homes were all electric, like the house we hadn’t Quaker Hill had baseboard heating, and electric range and electric water heater, everything was electric, right? Yeah, because that was PG needed a big push during them to go all electric. And then we went back to gas. And now we’re, we’re doing the opposite. Now we’re going back alto electric, that’s the big push in California and actually, around the world is going all electric and get running a gas. But anyway, that’s a whole other thing. So that really depends on so the load. What are we actually trying to? What are we actually trying to do if we’re, if we’re trying to cook heat, and heat or water electricity, we’re gonna need a bigger panel than if we’re not. Yeah, okay, right. Or if you’ve got a shop and you got a welder, or air compressor, or kiln or something like that, or electric dryer, all those things come into effect, Senator electric car. Yeah. But I did want, before we stop, I did want to talk about one other electrical issue that we run into a lot. And it’s kind of along the same range, it’s all about arcing, it’s all about overheating. It’s all about potential electric fires. And this is something that I’ll be honest, I did that I have installed plenty of these things in my younger years. Electrical outlets and electrical switches, they have what’s called a back stabbing installation capability, which simply means that there’s a hole in the back and you shove the bare wire right into the back of the the outlet or the switch. And there was a little piece of metal, kind of like a sharp tooth, it would you know, push or like one of those Chinese finger traps. You can push it in, but it won’t pull out. And let’s use a tool. They’re really great for saving labor because it makes it really fast to installs post a wire wrapping the wire around the screws. Unfortunately, they’ve come to be known as a fire hazard because of the fact that you’re literally talking about the connection is not that great? Because it’s this piece of metal that’s in there. And I’m doing hands signals for you. But no, no, no, we can see this. But basically you push the wire in and there’s this piece of spring wire spring metal in there that is holding up against the wire. That’s the connection. It’s not wrapped around a screw. It’s literally just a little small connection. That connection can start to fail after a while and will will arc and can cause fires. We’ve seen it I’ve seen outlets that have like black going up the wall next to him that are still installed. No one’s replaced them. No one’s actually even called us to say hey, you know, I got this black suit that’s coming out of the wall. Yeah, you know, and there’s got black suit because things are getting hot in there.
19:55
I’ve seen a few of those in house and have lived in by the way. Yeah,
19:59
it’s Yeah, it’s scary. So, yeah, you definitely want to definitely want to replace those things, because we’ve seen a lot of failures on those on a lot. And, you know, I’ve seen outlets just kind of melt in the wall because of those switches, that kind of just failed because of that. So yeah, it’s definitely these two things. As far as electrical things, those are the two big ones that we see out in the field in terms of dangers from electricity, other than, you know, poor installation and stuff like that, where people do stupid things, right, these are things that we’ll have, these are things that were installed at a time when it was acceptable. And it was an acceptable practice, actually, people still do this, you still, they still manufacture people still installing, we don’t do that we’ll wrap the wire around the screw, it’s just, it’s going to be a lot safer, it’s going to last a lot longer and not going to have any problems with it takes a little bit longer. It takes an extra, you know, three to five minutes to actually install. And it doesn’t seem like a lot in the scheme of things. But when you’re wiring a whole house, and you’ve got 50 outlets and switches, you could save a couple of hours an hour or so by doing the stabbing that’s that’s literally what we’re talking about saving 25 bucks on an install or 100 bucks on an install. Right? It’s not really worth it anymore. Well,
21:21
is this a good moment to mention that may special that you?
21:26
Yeah, so let’s do that. Because yeah, so you know, we don’t usually do this, we don’t usually talk about advertising our company that much. But this, this is something that you know, I mean, we’re getting into fire season. And then from forest fires, we want to save you from electrical fires. So yeah, which I’ll let you lead.
21:44
So for the month of May, basically what abt put together was a deal. So that if you were to call and book your electrical safety inspection, there’s a price of $99, which is a great, I mean, that’s a big savings, but special savings is out there. So we can take a look and make sure that we check out and the technician will have a whole checklist for you. And they’ll go through the whole thing with you. And then if there is any upgrades that need to be done, recommendations, conversations began, but the main thing is like to get us out there. So we can just make sure that you’re looking good. Nothing is alarming. You know, as we
22:23
nothing else is just peace of mind. Just to know that your electrical system was working the way it’s supposed to, and was installed the court installed. Well, to begin with, and one, like I did say, you know, barring any other things like that installation, I can’t tell you how many times and I’ve got my house is still we’re still figuring we’re still finding stuff at the house I live in for the past seven years, where people have added things like handyman have added things and not really knowing what code was or what safe installations were. Because this isn’t even talking about code. This is talking about safety. This is talking about, you know, code is based on protecting property and safety. And if you can’t do either of those, and you’re just trying to save some money and install it incorrectly, and having wires, loose wires or cutting wires and splicing and Midway and no junction boxes or running too small, the wire for too large of a load and the thing gets hot. Those are bad things. But even barring that things that were installed properly 2030 4050 years ago, may not actually be safe and longer. And things were out. Yeah, that’s the other thing. This the zinsco panels, they weren’t great to begin with. Now they’re 3050 30 to 50 years old or older. Some are 60 years old. Guess what? That’s got some wear and tear, there’s probably you probably got some issues going on in there. So yeah, definitely have us come out and take a look at it for 99 bucks. It’s it’s a good peace of mind. If we find anything, we’ll let you know. If we’ve got to do anything, we’ll let you know the price before we get started. So there’s no surprises on that. So yeah, what’s the phone number again?
24:01
Okay, so the phone number is 530-230-9092 Give us a call whether you want to kind of look into electrical safety inspection for the nine $9 For the month of May or if you have any other you know, plumbing H back or electrical issues. We’d love to chat with you. And you can find us on the web as well.
24:22
Why and also just really quick also we are doing a special for water heater inspection, safety inspection flushed through the 12th of this month for I can’t remember the price was what was 89 $89. And there’s a whole thing there. Let me let me make sure we check everything that’s it’s running safely, making sure that the carbon dioxide is going out through the flue making sure all
24:45
right, if you couldn’t tell, May has kind of been our self appointed Safety Month. So give us a call at 530-230-9092 Find us on the web is ebt.com And until next week, hopefully Andrew will be with us and We’ll talk to you about it thanks guys
25:03
thanks Andrew thanks Rosalie now let’s get that project started you got this we’ll be back next Friday morning at nine o’clock on Cancio Newstalk 830