Electricity 101 for the Partisan

I considered doing a "How to ClusterFoxtrot a Target's Home Systems" post all-in-one, but it would be too long.  So, we'll do a series.  And, we'll start with electricity.

If you have never dealt with electricity, please understand this reality: It'll kill you if you let it.  It'll curl your hair, if you let it.  It'll cook & burn the meat of your body like a bad Sunday cookout, if you let it. Yes, even the wimpy little 120 volts in your light sockets can mess up your day.  (or, depending on how well you are grounded, it may just give you a wee tingle)

Respect it as you would a loaded firearm. Electricity is like fire - a great tool that can hurt you if not respected.

Electrical guys - please don't pick nits, I'm trying to lay this out for the guy/gal who has never fiddled with electricity.  Do feel free to help break it down into simpler terms if I don't break it down enough.

The electricity that is generated at your local power plant is delivered to your home through a series of transmission wires that, literally, connect from your home all the way back to the plant.  The plant delivers big chunks of power to routing stations, then to sub-stations, then down your street (or buried underground in some communities) and then into your home.  Most homes have "Single-Phase" power, which for our purposes simply means that the power company runs 3 wires to your house.  2 are "Hot" and have electricity on them, the third is a "Ground" which physically ends at a long steel rod that is driven deeply into the ground somewhere near your house.

As water wants to flow downhill via gravity, electricity is ALWAYS seeking to find its way into the ground.  "Ground" isn't a technical term, it is literally the ground, the Earth.  Electricity wants to return to the Earth.  Here is where safety begins - never be "The Thing" standing between electricity and the Earth if you are not insulated - it'll run through you and into the ground, and curl your toes - not in the good way. 

In a community that has wires strung from poles to each house you can simply look upward and follow the wires to the house.  Here is a picture of the wires that come from the pole on my street to the house:

Cut either of them and my power essentially is out, though some appliances will probably still work, depending on which you cut.  To be safe and make sure the house goes dark, cut both wires - ONE AT A TIME!  Follow them from where they hit the house, and they go to a meter, which is almost always bolted to the outside of the house and looks like this:

In this particular meter, you can see a wire at the bottom, and also a tube - inside that tube is another set of wires.  One set runs into the meter (from the street) and the other goes through the wall into the house where it ties into your circuit breaker box, which looks something like this:

Most of you already know where your breaker box is located in your house (or garage).  If the installing electrician did his job properly, each breaker actually controls the electricity according to the neat little sticker.  For instance, the sticker may say "A/C" and if all is well, that breaker is for your HVAC system.  Too often, the labels in the boxes are either wrong or don't exist.

Turning the electricity off to a house in secret-squirrel mode is both simple, and risky.  Nosey neighbors, for one, may see you walking onto Mayor Dumbarse's property with bolt cutters, and "See Something, Say Something".  If you plan to do such a thing in daylight - look the part.  Noone looks twice at a repairman, if you look like a genuine repairman. 

If you mean to kill the power from outside you simply have to cut the 2 hot wires going to the house, or meter, or leaving the meter.  Here's the tricky part - those two hot wires, and the ground wire, are usually all encased in one piece of plastic and it can be tough to know where to cut.  If you simply cut the whole wire, be ready for a GREAT light show and pop.  The goal is to snip just one of the hot wires without letting the steel of your bolt cutter touch EITHER the other hot wire OR the ground wire.  Then repeat on the other hot wire.

SAFETY:  Make sure your bolt cutters have good rubber handles, your boots have good rubber soles, You are wearing good rubber gloves, and that no part of your body is "grounded", which includes leaning your forearm against the metal fencepost that is nearby for leverage.  Remember, electricity wants to go to ground.  The moment your steel blades from the bolt cutter begin cutting one of the hot wires, all of the steel in your bolt cutters is hot with electricity.  If any of that metal hits anything that is grounded - light show and big popping noise.  You may even pee yourself.

Next time you go to Home Depot, go to the electrical section and look at the coils of wire.  Look at the end and you'll see what I mean about several individual wires being encased in a single casing (usually each wire has its own casing, plus the larger casing that ties them all together - but not always).

If it is your intent to kill the power from outside, you can do it at the meter, but you can also do it at the pole.  Just follow the wire back to the pole, and scurry on up there on a ladder.  Remember - never touch a hot wire and ground at the same time, and never touch 2 hot wires at the same time.  Ever wondered why birds can hang out all day long on the power wires?  They aren't grounded.  You can physically hold a hot wire in your hand and have no worries - until you ground yourself or touch the second wire - then you turn into a crispy critter.  Often birds with large wingspans will kill themselves when they try to LEAVE a wire perch.  They are fine as long as they are sitting only on one wire, but when their wings spread, if they ground out or hit the second hot wire - boom.

If you decide to kill power from inside the house, just go to the circuit breaker box.  It will have one primary breaker inside, usually at the top, usually marked "MAIN".  If you flip that off, you usually kill all power to the house.  Or you can simply turn off a few breakers or a single breaker.  For instance, if you know Mayor Dumbarse is surfing porn and you turn off the breaker to his den, you can probably crouch in a corner and wait for him to come check the breakers...

In most jurisdictions the central air conditioner is required to have a fuse box mounted on the exterior wall of the house, near the unit, like so:

In case you don't know, the big boxes that say "York" are the A/C condensers, the gray and black box mounted on the brick wall is a fuse box - one for each unit.  If you would like to try to get your guy inside the house to come outside, all you have to do is open each of those fuse boxes (They are rarely locked, and if so it is a small padlock) and pull the little fuse holder inside - and his A/C goes down.  Depending on where you live and the weather, it may take a while before he notices the A/C isn't working, and he may or may not even know to walk outside - but it is worth a shot.  Side benefit: A hot house is much easier to defeat passive infra-red motion sensors - but that's for another column.

Not worried about stealth, or perhaps you don't care if an entire neighborhood goes dark?  Just remember the basic point - electricity WANTS the Earth - so introduce one to the other.  Make a love connection.  ;)  When a car hits a power pole and knocks wires to the ground, people lose power.  You know how kids will ties shoes together and then toss them up on the wires?  If some dummy did that with a length of chain, effectively becoming the bird with wide wings, the two wires "short out" and something down the line will pop.  A series of 6 or 8 foot chains thrown over the fence at a local sub-station that manage to make the electrical stuff touch the ground - well, that's just plain vandalism, it is wrong and should not be done, because there will be big, loud popping noises, flashing lights, lots of expensive equipment (some of which may take weeks to replace) will be destroyed, and every building downstream of that station will go dark, at least until auto-relays re-route the power.  2-3 substations that go down, well, re-routing becomes very, very difficult...

People in the area who lose their power may have family on life-support, and they will die.

That's enough for now.  Let me know if this sort of thing is useful.

Kerodin
III