I am not an electrician, but I’ve been doing some small wiring projects around my house.

Some of the outlets are loose in that you put in a plug and the plug doesn’t hold very well. So as I discover a problem outlet I’ve been swapping the outlet for a new one. Doesn’t take long to do the actual swap work, the hardest part is figuring out which circuit breaker to turn of. There’s no wiring diagram for the house, no labels on the switches, but I’ve got one of those little gizmos that plugs into the outlet and emits a signal which another dohicky held against the breaker switch can pick up and tell me which circuit things are on. So it’s certainly not guesswork, just time consuming. And yes, while I’ve done my best to identify and label things, I always find out that the wiring in the house is pretty strange and well… maybe there’s logic to how it was wired but I sure can’t find it.

I changed the light switch in the laundry room to have a motion sensor switch. These would be good to have in other rooms of the house as well, especially from a security standpoint. Wife and I are still deciding which rooms and locations would be best.

And today I completed another change, which I’m very happy about.

The exterior lights are controlled by interior switches. I went in search of timer switches so the exterior lights could be on a simple timer. Well, Lowes didn’t have any simple timers. They had these $27-each digital timers, but man, they are cool! You set the date, the time, if you’re on Daylight Saving Time or not, and you even set what region of the country you’re in (we’re in “south”). Then you can program up to 7 slots of on-off times: for each day of the week, for the 5 weekdays, for the 2 weekends, or for all 7 days of the week. You can set actual on and off times, or — and this is the cool part — sunrise or sunset. Because it knows the date, the time, and your general location in the USA, it calculates the sunrise and sunset times and you can have the lights turn on at sunset and on at sunrise. That is COOL! I don’t have to adjust the timer all year to go on and off when I want (which is sunrise and sunset). Sweet!  As well, I wonder if the switches have an internal battery or maybe a capacitor because after wiring switch 1 and programming it, I then learned that switch 2 was also on the same circuit as switch 1 so while I wired switch 2 I figured I was going to have to go back to reprogram switch 1. But I didn’t, and it was still the correct time. Nifty!  I do hope it’s just a capacitor and holds enough to deal with short power interruptions, because I don’t want to change batteries… what a pain.

Anyway, nice stuff. Helps the house look nicer, work better (automation is good!), improves security. Can’t beat that for a few hours of work this morning.