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The Butterfly Effect: you know, a butterfly in Australia starts a small air current that turns into a breeze, which in turn creates a weather pattern that eventually creates a hurricane that devastates the Bahamas.
Case-in-point, the house across the road has been empty for an extended period of time. My neighbors and I noticed an increase in the rodent population recently. These are not bantam weight mice we’re talking about here. They’re hefty boogars.
I live in a home built in 1927, and as I’ve found over the years, it wasn’t built well. I’ve plugged every hole I can find, but I feel like the boy plugging holes in a dam. I’m running out of digits to fill leaks-lol.
I had a breaker flip the other night. In this crazy house, this one breaker serves outlets throughout our house, in several different room, with no rhyme or reason to the order. Luckily, I’ve mapped out the unmarked circuits through the years, and know pretty much which circuits go where.
I started troubleshooting my circuits by in plugging every device from the affected outlets, and resetting the breaker. At first, it seemed as though I had a bad outlet or appliance somewhere. However, the breaker threw again, which told me I had a wiring issue. Upon inspecting one of my outlets in the wall adjacent to my bathroom, I noticed some watermarks in the wallboard, behind my daughter’s bed. Then I heard it-the tell-tale sound of a pinhole spray behind the wall.
I remodeled my bathroom recently, and replaced all of my galvanized pipes with PEX tubing. I love PEX. my first thought was guilt-maybe I didn’t get a good crimp on my rings. Off goes the water, and I cut out a sizable hole in what turned out to be completely soft, water-logged, surprisingly thin wallboard and paneling (this is a girl’s room, and the paneling has been painted yellow, red, blue, and purple, I think). We also discovered the original wallpaper pattern underneath the paneling. It looked very Victorian, green, and floral.
What I discovered was a pinhole in the cold water supply to my bathroom sink, but it wasn’t due to my negligence…it had been gnawed on. At the base of the wall was a nest. The pinhole had run down the wire, and flowed into the outlet. The outlet was actually powered from underneath, which allowed the drip to run to a junction under the floor in my crawl space, shorting out the non-hot wire, flipping my breaker. The wallboard was ruined, and worse, we now have a mold issue.
We were fortunate there wasn’t a fire, so I’m happy for the glass half full.
It just goes to prove, a small problem can quickly turn into a major issue, so you’d better have a troubleshooting, preparedness, and problem-solving mindset to deal with-THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT! Learn everything you can about every kind of skill imaginable. Knowledge is power. The wisdom on how to apply that knowledge comes from real life. You can’t fake real survival wisdom.
Keep it between the ditches,
Eric