It would be better if I had a good customer base. Kinda in bum**** nowhere right now.

And... ergh. Over here, they changed the system on what needs to be notified, but any new runs need to be told about, as well as board changes and anything around showers. Those are the big things. The biggest thing is, I suppose, knowing how to test and make sure your work is safe. And never working live, which is a little more than just not touching cables. But once you start looking into the hardware for that, well... my multifunction tester was £400 and that was the cheap model. I also picked up a decent voltage tester (which also doubles as a weapon given how sharp the probes are) for £100 including the... uh. Tester tester.

The installation is easy enough - but making sure cables can handle the maximum load in that specific condition, plus things like disconnection times (which I think is mostly an issue of you use earth spikes as opposed to supply earth) and a few other more technical bits can be daunting. And, frankly, unsafe if done incorrectly. It's on the head of the person that signed off the work if it catches fire and causes damage or death.

And as for cost..? Well, that depends on the size of the garage. Chewing through the ground takes a ****load of time. And presumably, that $2000 was for... mh, sockets, lights, and a distribution board, although I would think parts were included in that. But yeah, if you needed spikes, that would have driven the cost up because that would probably be a ***** to do. Plus, cable is expensive as balls. 16mm SWA is about £15 a metre, and you'll easily spend as much in cable as you do accessories.

Gotta save up about £5-6k to become full-fledged. I can only work in houses at the moment.

Le Parisien!



Woah. Sounds hardcore. I was always completely useless at doing anything with my hands, mostly sat in front of a computer. I'm one of those people who have problems assembling IKEA furniture now, so it's hard for me to imagine even attempting something like that. Where'd you learn to do this stuff?



Sounds cool. I used to know a guy who ended up working as a civil engineer doing tunnel work and is now working for some company in Prague.

Re: electrical engineer, my grandfather was one of the chief electricians who worked on the Answan Dam back when U.S.S.R. was still around. I think that's pretty cool. He told me all kinds of stories about how Egypt was in the 60's (70's?).

It's an honorable (and dangerous) profession. Best of luck!

Hmm. That's actually better than "I played with LEGO as a child and now I want to be a structural engineer."

Curious, why MS in Environmental? Work for government?

I build cnc machines, I'm the assembly and paint guy.

I also work part time at a motorcycle shop, just a shop boy for right now.

So pretty much.

I love the precision assembly at my day job. These cnc machines are HUGE. So I'm aligning and measuring tolerances on large components, so big they get moved with a crane.

Its ****ing awesome.

At the shop I get to work on vintage japanese motorcycles. When I lost my father this year I knew I had to keep that aspect of our family alive and work on doing it professionally, maybe even race. Its great, and being around like minded people has really helped me deal with my loss.

Because the field is booming right now with all the small water systems in California (and other states) that are out of compliance for nitrate contamination, arsenic, etc. People are literally being told not to drink their water and we don't really have a solution for them.

They basically recruited me into the program and are paying for my entire degree and also paying me a salary to get it. I love what i'm doing and this is the exact reason I chose civil engineering, to work with water. I could not be happier.

I didn't post in the old thread so I have no way of knowing. BUT, I was probably somewhere in "making games" territory at that point.

Right now I'm working as a graphic designer/video editor for a network hardware company, and going to school for animation and illustration in a program that has a good reputation and strong connections with the games and animation industries. So I have a reasonably good shot at that, depending on how hard I work. That said, my time in the animation program has broadened my expectations to some extent--I'm happy to be doing paid illustration work in any field. A Valve Software gig would be the dream, though.

I don't know what I wanted to do when I joined Massassi. I found the site almost by accident, and had no idea you could modify games until I got here. I think I wanted to be a jet fighter pilot when I was a little kid.

I still disagree. Humans have zero instincts for handling electricity and we can't even sense it. It's probably not ignorance that will get you- following the electric code isn't rocket science (assuming you care about making sure you do it right). What's going to kill you is not having safe habits and practices. All the lock out tag out procedures and things like that are very important to prevent a simple oversight that leaves you dead. All it takes is getting distracted at the wrong second, and you grab a circuit that you were certain was not energized.

Wait, I didn't think that you could easily die from 120V. Not with the resistance of dry human skin. But then again I've never been shocked to find out.

You can't, as long as its on a 20A breaker and the breaker isn't defective (they can be, but it's incredibly rare). Household electrical is very safe to do yourself.

The bigger danger is starting an electrical fire. The greatest risk of doing your own electrical, though, is not doing it to code and getting caught when you try to resell. Stuff like improperly coupling copper and aluminum, cheaping out on GFCI in bathrooms and not using AFCI in bedrooms. Some codes even require that AFCI circuits use a blue casing, even though the regular stuff is exactly the same an inspector can list it as a defect at sale.

My plan to wire a shop some day is to use surface-mount BX and then if there are any problems I can tear it out super easy. Still gonna hire an electrician to install the panel.

What? If you pull anything close to 20A through you, you will be toast. It's very unwise to trust the resistance of the skin, as that can vary by a huge amount with conditions that aren't easy to detect. Also, a less than lethal current can quickly change the resistance of the load and become a lethal current, which is on the order of 100mA across the arms.

50mA across the chest will probably drop you without medical help.

RCDs these days (almost) negate the chance of any severe shock - when working correctly, they trip within milliseconds. However, they don't work between live conductors. If you grab neutral and line, you're ****ed. And you cannot rely on a circuit breaker to save you - if you were ****ing with an electric shower and shocked yourself, the thing only has to disconnect within five seconds to be considered safe, although this is more the case of safe as in non-destructive to property, rather than life.

That being said, I've never heard anything about the use of arc-fault protection. But over here, we use higher voltages, apparently use copper a hell of a lot more (aluminium is only used for anything bigger than, mmh, 50mm[sup]2[/sup] cable, I think) and there are fuses in everything.

On which note, in most examples I've seen, a power ring over here is run off 32A breakers. Lights are rarely more than 6A, but there is little else between those two. Immersion heaters and fixed-wired combi-boilers come to mind, but that's about it.

Realistically you're talking about 2300 ohms at the absolute bottom end, and that's like across your hand. And if you're wet, your GFCI is going to trip. And even those risks are predicated upon completely forgetting to turn off the breaker.

Basically everybody who dies doing home electrical eats it while working inside their panel, because they think turning off the main is enough to make the bus safe to touch. Not while installing a fixture or pulling cable. Electrical fires are a much, much bigger danger.

Builders have been using aluminum for residential off and on here for years, as the price of copper fluctuates. It's a lot more labor intensive.

We don't wire receptacles the way you do, but new construction here typically has lighting on 15A and 20A outlet/lighting, with older homes throwing everything on the same handful of 15A circuits.

1. I'm currently Director of Basketball Analytics for an NBA team (woo Moneyball!)

2 and 3. Definitely thought I'd be doing something in computer science / programming (although I do use a little programming in the above)

Holy ****. I wish I'd taken social science statistics more seriously, because I'm currently really big into sports stat analysis and I'd have killed to have a job like this (were I not terrible at the actual math).

Edit: And advanced basketball analysis is in a really exciting place right now, compared to other sports.

Back in 2004 (if I'm counting right) I was working on QA for home automation equipment. Mostly RS232/CAN bus/embedded Linux stuff along with some electrical wiring, playing with relays, and some perl scripting for log monitoring and security testing. I was going to college with the aspiration of becoming a history major and/or full-time author.

Now, I manage the Storage Area Networking for one of IBM's offerings. It's all remote administration since our account data centers are in other states unfortunately, so the only hands-on work I get to do is in the lab every now and then. I really miss moving around and working on equipment with my hands though so I've been applying for a transfer to doing on-site service instead lately.

https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/construction/electrical_incidents/eleccurrent.html According to OSHA, and several other sources I found, the lower end in around a thousand, but 2300Ohms is plenty. The trouble is, under normal dry circumstances, you're barely even going to feel anything. That gives you a false sense of security because there are many conditions that could change that to make the same contact lethal. You might be fine nine out of ten times, and then you die a painful death. The reason this is so dangerous is that the precautions necessary to mitigate dangerous situations are not intuitively obvious.

A GFCI will only trip if it sees current going somewhere other than the return, btw. If you make contact between line and return, as far as it is concerned, you are just a very tiny load.

1) Strategy consulting
2) Surgeon
3) Research in AI/robotics

Want to get into private equity in a year - if that doesn't happen, top 5 MBA. Could be doing worse... but could also be doing a lot better. Pretty lost actually so just chasing money - typical ****. Maybe be fortunate enough to stay the course, retire early, attend quarterly board meetings, figure out how I'm going to leave a legacy, and hopefully find some inner peace for once in my life.

no i am most certainly not doing what i want to be doing with my life, in fact i think i am worse off than i was 5 years ago

I'm not where I thought I'd be, but I'm happy where I am.

1. Middle/High School English Teacher (Alternative Ed. program for grades 7-10).
2. I was in college studying English. I wanted to be a writer.
3. I was 14. That was half my life ago. I honestly can't remember at all.

That's interesting, Darth, I remember you posting one time about having a really bad day as a substitute teacher and thinking of leaving the profession. :p

1. stay at home mom
2. i was in high school so probably not this
3. probably this