WWKD #2

My younger daughter came out of the shower and left the bathroom door open. The wired smoke alarm is outside of the bathroom door, and if you leave the door open, even with the exhaust fan running, the alarm will go off. This alarm, as opposed to the other battery powered ones in the house, sets off our dog Max. He goes bananas when he hears it, and is not bothered by the other ones, even the kitchen alarm which goes off when we open the heated stove.

Hearing Max carrying on downstairs, and having her parents yell at her to close the door, she grabbed a magazine and tried to fan the steam away from the alarm, and succeeded in knocking the alarm off the ceiling.

It stopped screaming of course, but was on the floor and the wires were hanging down.

I ran up and looked at it. The alarm was down, fallen out of it's holder, the wires had a connecter and they were still in one piece, but the electrical box it was connected to was also beginning to hang. This was not a good thing, and as I was going to work I figured I'd deal with it later.

The next morning I investigated, and the box was hanging, and upon further investigation, I realized the box was never correctly installed in 1983, when the house was built.

A long time electrician in the area told me some time ago that these houses were put up at a time when the builder used anyone he could get and some kid had probably done a lot of the work. The box in the basement was running at 80 amps rather then 100. We changed that later on. So, whoever had put this box in the ceiling did so by sticking it in and shimming it, rather than fixing it onto a joist.

The path was clear, in order to correctly repair this problem was to pull out the box, find a joist attach the box, cut a new hole, replace the alarm and repair the ceiling.

WWKD?

Using the Klaus repair ethic, I put the box back in, replaced the shims, used construction grade adhesive to secure the box to it's original place and refixed the alarm.

It works fine, and unless it's knocked out of the ceiling again, it's just fine!