We had the fuse board replaced in our house yesterday. We wanted a safety switch and the electrician looked at our board (which is probably the original from the 60s or 70s) and suggested a replacement.
What I learnt from the experience:
- Apparently booking time to get it done means you're booking time to have a quote (even though you already had a quote) and that they "can't do it today because we've got a rewiring to do" but if you look really sad and say you took time off work for this they'd do it anyway.
- Replacing a fuse board in a house takes three hours and costs over $700
- It's surprisingly noisy work
- The TV and fridge make scary noises when suddenly shut down and again when started up
- Meat (and ice) will keep frozen happily in our freezer, even when turned off for three hours
- Alone in a house with no electricity there is nothing to do but read
- I don't like having three random guys in our bedroom, if I had hackles they'd have been up
- Three of our wall sockets don't have earths
- Our dog does eventually shut up if the random people don't show their faces at her fence, unless they make a loud bump
From a programmers perspective I made the following notes...
Every single thing the electrician did he tested. Cut a wire, test it. Connect that wire to something. Test it. They even regression tested the whole house before the left, testing all the power plugs. That's why it took three hours.
And I had a tiny glimpse into the managers mind. The poor manager who has to listen to lots of complicated explaination as to why they need to spend $$$ on replacing all that "old, out of date database code". The poor manager who after the work is done, opens his app and sees absolutely nothing different.
Everything in our house works. Just like before.
Only now if something goes wrong the fuse switch will go *click* instead of *melt*.