Dullsters

1487 readers

3 users here now

Inspired by the Dull Men’s Club.

1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of “discuss” rarely comply with this rule.

2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.

3. Avoid repetitive topics.

4. This isn't an advice forum

Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions or identify objects. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.

There are a number of content specific communities with subject matter experts who can help you.

Some other communities to consider before posting:

5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.

6. No hate speech, sexism, or bullying No sexism, hate speech, degrading or excessively foul language, or other harmful language. No othering or dehumanizing of anyone or negativity towards any gender identity.

7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with “So” - starting a post with pointless phrases, like “I hope this is allowed” or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

admin@dullsters.net

This month's electrical horror show: tilted electrical box in the wall (feddit.nl)

submitted 7 months ago by shane@feddit.nl to c/Dullsters@dullsters.net

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have been slowly replacing my light switches with these awesome dimmer switches:

https://eu.aqara.com/products/aqara-dimmer-switch-h2-eu

I really like them as they work fine on their own if the Zigbee network is down (for example if I have broken my Home Assistant server), and allow full control via Zigbee. So I can have things like lights which come on so my partner doesn't come home to a dark house, and set them to go on and off when we are on vacation.

I'm doing it slowly since they are kind of expensive, and also since every time I do any IoT home improvement project it goes wildly wrong.

Anyway, this is yesterday and today's surprise... the insets for this switch and the outlet next to it are tilted. Whoever installed the electrical stuff just sort of jammed it into place to level it out.

I feel a bit lame for just jamming in the new stuff too, but there is no way that I am going to re-drill the holes and redo everything.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] shane@feddit.nl 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes, all the wires were black when I opened the panel up. 🙈

Other light switches in my house had no neutral wire, which is surprising to me since our house is not very old. 😥 This one had three wires, so presumably with a neutral... probably because it is right next to a power outlet, unlike the other switches I replaced so far, which let whatever hack the lazy person who wired this up easily add ground.

I labelled each wire what I thought it should be, based on where they were inserted into the old switch. The old light switch had no markings on it to indicate what each hole was for, but one was red, so almost certainly the live wire. One of the other two was the return wire and the other the neutral.

I ended up just guessing, which powered up the new Zigbee switch but didn't actually light up the lamp. Swapping those two did the job and now it's perfect in every way, although I'm waiting for some wall filler to dry so the ugly gap at the top can be eliminated....

[–] gws@programming.dev 2 points 6 months ago

You guessed, and wired up... without metering anything? 😱