Circuits, Breakers, and Electricity. Oh My!

Amy and I are having a lot of fun doing home projects and getting everything just the way we want things.  Today, I was going to add a new circuit breaker to take power out to the front yard.  An area that is painfully lacking in an electrical outlet.

The plan, as always, was a simple one.  The pervious owners of this house had a hot tub (it was, thankfully, gone when we moved in).  I knew that dropping a new electrical wire would be a nigh impossible task with how full this circuit breaker box is, so we decided to simply high jack the electrical line that used to go to the hot tub.

Basically, we’d take the 30 AMP breaker that is presently in there and replace it with a 15 AMP breaker.  Then we’d take the electrical line that is sitting in the attic (attached to nothing, don’t worry) and simply attach the new line to the end of that line inside a junction box.

That’s when I was introduced to a type of breaker called Zinsco.  They look like this

They are also HORRIBLY outdated.  They are also, and more importantly, against electrical codes due to a design flaw in which the circuit breaker's connection to the bus bar becomes loose, causing arcing and subsequent overheating.

How did I find all this out?  I went to Home Depot where a kindly associate pointed me to the replacement breaker that cost 70 dollars!  OUCH!

The long story short is that I was able to purchase a replacement on eBay for 7 bucks and will continue this project in a couple weeks.  In the long run, I will need to replace the entire panel, but that’s a very expensive (though only slightly more than how much Home Depot would have charged me for the breaker) and timely, so it will be a project for much letter.

Ironically, however, I’m thinking about changing my mode of attack for putting an electrical outlet out there.  Where before I was going to drop the line through a water proof pipe out of my attic down the side of my house and into a waterproof outlet box.  I’m thinking that a better option may be to actually just boor a whole in my outer brick wall and tap into an outlet in the guest bedroom.

Then I’ll just flush mount the waterproof outlet and it will look significantly nicer.  It’s not like I need a huge AMP rating on this outlet either.  I literally just need an outlet out there to hook my weed eater up.  The only other things on this circuit (Amy and I mapped all the circuits last week) are the outlets in the guest room and 2 in the office and 2 in the master bedroom.  So unless I decide to hook a ridiculous amount of high Amperage equipment to each outlet at once, tapping in to the preexisting outlet should work just fine.

Any thoughts? (other than call Daniel’s father-in-law, our local electrician)

Circuits, Breakers, and Electricity. Oh My!