att said:
Interesting thread. When I bought a dishwasher I tried to get an
electrician to connect it. He wanted to tap
into an existing outlet on the backsplash behind the sink. I told him to
piss off, added a run of BX to the
breaker box and added a new breaker dedicated to the dishwasher. Doing it
myself might not have been legal,
but it was a hell of a lot safer.
I've had the same sorts of experiences with licensed so-called
professionals. My 70 year old water main split. I dug the entire 35'
from the house back to the...Oh Spit! Someone had planted a tree smack
on top of the line!
My wife, not believing I'd see the project through quickly enough,
called the 'pros'. They came out the next day with a backhoe, intending
to trench 'around' the tree...warning me that it would surely not
survive the process.
According to Code hereabouts, a water main is allowed only one 90 degree
joint, where it turns to go under the house. Not only were they going
to kill my tree, they planned to go around the tree, putting three more
elbows into the system. (The meter was only five feet from the tree.)
Fortunately, when they arrived, there was a car parked right in the way.
I told them to take their machine away, come back the next day and I'd
have the excavation done and ready for new pipe.
I excavated the pipe on the far side of the tree, cut it off on both
sides and worked the stub out from the house-side. Before the hole
could collapse, I threaded a garden hose through it, under the tree. My
thought was that I could turn on the hose (my neighbor's) and wash out a
larger hole with it.
It proved unnecessary. The plumbers arrived and after much
head-scratching (and a threat to get sent away again), decided they
'could' get the new copper through that hole--and did. We used the same
trick to get under the house foundation and into the basement, turning a
$1600 job into a $400 one--and to Code. (I needed their sign-off to do
the meter connection--and to mitigate the $1400 water bill I got the
next month.)
jak