Some Like It Grounded
March 19th, 2010 by ComputerBob
This is yet another one of my many do-it-yourself adventures, joining such classics as Some Like It Hot and Some Like It Warm and Some Like It Soft and Some Like It Connected.
My wife and I have been living in our dream home here in the Sunshine State since mid-2004.
All this time, only one minor thing has bugged me about this home. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but I knew that it had something to do with its electrical wiring.
It seemed like it just wasn’t capable of handling everything that we plugged into it.
For example, if you put something in the microwave oven at half-power, causing it to cycle on and off every few seconds, then every time the power would kick on, the kitchen lights would dim slightly, for a fraction of a second.
And in my home office, every time my laser printer would start to print something, the office lights and the lights in the guest bathroom would dim slightly, for a fraction of a second.
And during the rainy (AKA lightning) season, my PCs — or the color TV in our living room — would sometimes suddenly shut down like there had been a power failure, sometimes even when the lights in the house hadn’t even flickered.
And if you were talking on the phone (either wired or cordless) and someone used the microwave oven, it caused crackly static on the phone line.
I basically just learned to live with those minor annoyances, figuring that they were a few of the costs of living in a home that was built in the mid-1960s.
But just yesterday, I figured out that those symptoms are not normal, and it looks like I fixed them — all of them.
And it turns out that it all happened because a swarm of bees tried to make its home in one of our home’s outer cinder block walls over a year ago.
One morning, I stepped into our kitchen and heard a loud buzzing sound, like someone was using a very tiny chainsaw just a few feet away from me.
I tried to trace the source of the sound, but couldn’t find it in my kitchen, so I decided to explore some more outside. That’s when I discovered a swarm of hundreds of bees flying around, a few feet below my kitchen window. A huge mass of hundreds more them was swarming all over something that was on the ground.
They had found a small opening in the stucco alongside of an outdoor water spigot, and were obviously making plans to move themselves and all of their relatives into my home’s wall through that opening.
I immediately drove to a nearby professional pest control store and bought some heavy duty bee spray.
Then I waited until after dark, when the temperature had dropped and all of the bees were asleep.
With my heart pounding, I soaked some paper towels with the bee spray. Then, as quickly as I could, I covered the mass of bees that were sleeping on the ground with an overturned bucket, with the poisonous paper towel inside; and duct-taped all around the spigot, trapping the rest of the sleeping bees inside the wall. Then I inserted the bee spray’s long plastic tube into a crack between the long strips of duct tape and sprayed a whole bunch of the bee spray right into the wall.
You wouldn’t believe the sound I heard. The angry buzzing of those hundreds of bees was much, much louder and more concentrated than it had been when many of them had been flying around.
It was a terrifying sound, even though I knew that none of those bees could get out and “get me.”
Because I knew that they really, really wanted to.
I put something heavy on the bucket, to hold it down, and quickly went back inside.
The next morning, I didn’t hear any buzzing in my kitchen. But outside, I found twenty or thirty bees buzzing around the overturned bucket and the duct-taped wall. I stood very still and patiently waited for each bee to land on something so that I could spray it. It took awhile, but I eventually got all of them. The spray knocked them down almost immediately, and then killed them within a minute or two.
Out of fear, I waited several days before I carefully removed that overturned bucket. Inside were hundreds of dead bees.
Flash forward to a a few days ago. While working on my garage’s new ethernet connection, I noticed that I had never removed the duct tape from the wall underneath my kitchen window.
So two days ago, I peeled off that duct tape and patched the hole around the water spigot, so that it won’t tempt any more insects in the future.
But while I was about to patch that hole, I noticed that there was a saddle clamp attached to that water spigot — or more correctly, not attached to it.
It appeared as though that saddle clamp had originally been attached to the thick pipe of the spigot itself, but over time, it had come loose and worked its way closer to the wall, where it was barely dangling from the spigot’s narrower copper water pipe.
I was about to remove it completely when I noticed that between the two big screws that were supposed to mount the saddle clamp itself, there was a third screw that was meant to hold a short, thick copper wire that protruded from the nearby textured stucco.
In the old days when my home was built, instead of driving a long grounding rod into the ground and connecting a thick copper wire from that rod to the ground connection in the home’s main electrical breaker box, they used to connect a thick copper wire from the main electrical breaker box to one of the home’s cold water pipes, which are set in the home’s concrete slab.
I suddenly realized that the dangling saddle clamp and its loose copper wire that I was about to remove were my home’s main ground connection — a very, very poor ground connection.
So, instead of removing it, I carefully rearranged the saddle clamp so that it fit over the thick part of the spigot again. Then I carefully bent the heavy copper wire so that it would easily reach into the appropriate hole in the saddle clamp.
Then I tightened all three screws as tight as i could.
I’m very happily shocked (pun intended) to report that I did a bunch of tests after that, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t make our lights go dim any more, and there’s no more crackly static on the phone line when someone uses the microwave oven.
Thank you, dead bees.
Permalink:
http://www.computerbob.com/wp/some-like-it-grounded.php
Tags:
Consumer Info, DIY, Personal, Tech Support
August 28th, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Oh, Bob–I hope you meant “wasps” or “yellow jackets” and not honey bees! Wasps and jackets I kill every season, but if they were bees, say it ain’t so. They are vital for pollination of not just flowers, but numerous fruit. Lots of produce depend on them, and they’re dying mysteriously all over. Please don’t kill bees–let them alone where you find them, but block up any holes in the house for next year. But I don’t think bees make nests inside walls. Not that I’ve seen.
August 28th, 2010 at 7:20 pm
You’re right — honey bees are a valuable resource.
I’m not a bee expert, but from what I could tell, these were the size of what I think of as “regular bees,” but they weren’t “regular bees.” They were in a constant state of anger and agitation, whether I was observing them from several feet away or watching them out my kitchen window and hearing their loud, angry buzzing from inside my house.
Africanized bees? I don’t know.
I just know that they were whatever kind of bees is angry and agitated every waking moment.
And I’m really relieved that they’re gone.