Whenever you mess with electricity...

Dustin83

AC Members
Nov 17, 2005
370
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Orange County, CA
REMEMBER TO UNPLUG YOUR EQUIPMENTS!!!!!

I just had a horrific experience and couldn't help but to share with everyone here, so that this doesn't happen with anyone else.

We just installed new security sensor lights around the house, and we hired a "professional" (you'll see why I put it in " " soon) to take care of it. To make it look clean, he said it was necessary to mess with the wirings that were running inside one of the walls.

This happens to be the same wall where my 30 gallon setup was plugged into. Not knowing anything, I left all the equipments plugged in. I normally use surge protector, but didn't have it at the time as this was only few days after we moved to the new house and the surge protector was nowhere to be found.

Until this moment, I don't exactly know what this "professional" did to the wring, but when I came back home that night, ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING that used electricity was BLOWN out. CF light fixture, heater, powerheads, pumps, etc. EVERYTHING BLOWN OUT. The ballast for the light fixture smelled like BBQ. Of course, when I confronted the "professional", he said he had nothing to do with it. How did I know he was going to say that...

I rushed to the LFS, bought two T5 bulbs to put under the old fixture, bought one of those small HOB filter (because I like little bit of medium), bought two powerheads to add some serious waterflow, and bought a small cheap heater. Fortunately, I have a new tank ready to be setup, so I bought all these as a "temporary stop-the-bleeding" measure.

Please remember my horrific experience and use surge protector, and whenever you mess with electricity, unplug your equipments.

Good day everyone!
 
Probably, like most "professionals", they have a tendancy to work things live, especially on 120 circuits. He bumped leads together a few times to many.
 
*Sueing time*

j/k, but you should tell the authorities or something that this "proffesional" was messing with live wires in your house and could have fried your tank's inhabitants along with the equipment, and both are veeeeery expensive.

I hope that, if you do notify the cops, they make him refund the money that was lost in all that.
 
wow...that's awful.

get someone else in to have a look at this joker's work...if your suspicions are confirmed think taking a case against him.
 
What the guy probably did was accidently splice the wrong 2 wires together thereby doubling the voltage. So, a jolt of 240 volts probably fried all of your stuff. Good luck trying to prove it. But you can always file a small claims suit and see if the company would rather just pay you off as opposed to having to go to court.

Good luck and sorry for the extra expense.
 
Yup. Lesson learned.. the hard way...

I guess I should be glad that it was only the fish tank equipments that were plugged into the wall... what if the LCD TV was in the same plug or something.. gees.
 
fish tank being tampered with due to some stupidity on someone elses fault is a ticket for a small claims suit or at the very least an @$$ chewing to a supervisor. I would not pay someone to come mess something up in my house.:mad2:
 
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