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TIL the worst panel swap of my life was in a 1920s house in Akron with a fuse box hiding behind drywall
Spent 9 hours last Tuesday on what should have been a 3 hour panel upgrade because the old fuse box was buried behind a finished basement wall and every circuit was cloth wrapped with no labels. The homeowner kept bringing me snacks and apologizing, which honestly made it worse because I couldn't even be mad at her. Around hour 6 I pulled a circuit that turned out to feed the garage 40 feet away and tripped over a pipe wrench I'd left in the dark. Ended up labeling all 22 circuits with a tone probe and finishing at 11pm, but she tipped me $80 cash and left a 5 star review that mentioned me by name. What's your go-to move when you open a wall and find a mess nobody warned you about?
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hall.charles26d ago
Sorta gotta push back on the tone probe part. A probe only works on live wires or ones you can trace back to a known end, and on old cloth knob and tube a lot of those runs are dead or tied into junctions buried in the walls. What actually saves you there is a fox and hound on the dead pair or just ringing it out with a meter and a long lead. Also 22 circuits in a 1920s Akron house sounds about right, those old fuse panels were usually 30 amp service feeding way too much. The real killer on those jobs is the cloth insulation crumbling the second you move it, so you end up redoing runs you never planned on touching. Nine hours is honestly fast for that mess, snacks or not.
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