Electric window

Pressing on with the determination of a marathon runner going uphill, the household races to complete, or at least inch closer to completing, most of the main DIY projects.

First up, the electrics.

Thanks to Obi Wan's loan of a multi-meter, each electrical wire is checked to see how much current they contain.

Apart from a rogue spark exploding, the job goes rather well. Here is our stove. Yes, we have a working stove now (the oven at least).

Talking of the kitchen..

The decision is made to shut the kitchen window, that is currently being propped wide open by Sitex steel bars. We decide to retain the bottom Sitex steel bars, because the idea is to keep the metal sheet on, reattaching it straight away with our two-bolts-and-some-string technique.

Here is the angle grinder being used to dismantle the top and middle Sitex bars :

Da-daaah!

Despite a crack or two in the panes, the kitchen feels warm at last.

Light saber

Seriously, a lookalike for Obi Wan Kenobi, as played by Ewan Mcgregor, comes over to sort out our electrics.

Or, to be put it another way, an electrician Obi Wan stunt double who could very well have fought Darth Maul, instead fights through our tangle of electrical wires whilst balancing himself carefully on the edge of a broken metal chair, with all the silent concentration that would probably be the envy of most Jedi.

First up, we get wired into the fuseboard.

An extension cord is then attached to act as an interim power socket.

New switches are added to the ripped-up kitchen sockets.

Thanks to the company head being connected to the outside supply, the electricity box is now live. With a desk lamp from next door wired up to a kitchen socket, we huddle about it, waiting for a moment of revelation. Obi Wan stands eagerly at the box, ready to flip on the power.

Will the wall sockets explode? Will the lamp explode? Will nothing happen?

We are standing within an inch of power restoration, but is this still too much distance to run?

Nope.

For this happens :

Ladies and gentlemen,

We have electricity. It is momentous.

Spot the difference

At some point, you'll stop seeing multiple pictures of our electrical pipes at various stages of hacked. You'll stop seeing them in this blog, probably at the point when ALL the electrics are up and running and our candelit nights become a distant myth.

Some day, we will all be able to look back on these photos together, with either nostalgia or with memory lapses, thanks to other more fun memories overlapping them out of the picture.

In the meantime, forgive us for this long game of Spot the Difference.

The following images are all the work of SoundsNorwegian, whom in the past few days has made the state of our electrics look less impossible. The sheer joy in her "It's just having the right tools!" says it all.

Sawn-off pipework, up until 2pm today.

Diagram Drawing Electrician was right all along -- a ratchet does the job. Just loosen the nuts below the pipes, for extra pipe malleability!

SNAP!! This is what all the sawing was about! Such ease in the way it breaks off (but the entire process has not been in five minutes, boys).

The wires are free! Freedom to wires! Wire liberation!

At last.

Thoughts about water

Water.

Thanks to USgal, the running water in the kitchen is now connected up to the waste pipes :

The other night (Saturday, I think), whilst eating a hearty vegetarian curry at a neighbour's, the topic of domestic water usage arose. Said neighbour does not have a cistern in her toilet or a waste water pipe in her kitchen.

Instead, as you can see from the photo below, the excess water that drains from the kitchen sink does so into a bucket directly underneath.

The bucket is then used as waste water in the toilet. Kitchen Sink Neighbour has a number of buckets in rotation. The biggest thing she has noticed is just how much water can be wasted in the kitchen and how much water is needed to flush the loo. It is something she is sure would go un-thought about if the conventional pipework was in place.

Without water bills, we're sure that households with the traditional plumbing don't get to realise how much water they flush away or throw out daily. Just physically witnessing it is eye opening. Even in these ecological times, there is no government advert warning people about their toilet use or educating them into conserving water in the home. We are flushing, boiling and unplugging away blindly.

The other day, we were discussing baths and whether we wanted a bath or shower installed. Would we return to our habits of a shower a day without thinking about it? Right now, a bucket of hot water from Kitchen Sink Neighbour and a scrubbing brush is all we rely on, a basic but efficient way to get the job done. You can see the dirt before your eyes and you boil the exact water you need, using it well, appreciating it as you cleanse away. That, or dropping by a friend who kindly lets you use their facilities.

How did the pre-hot water generation take their baths? A friend of mine told me that back in the 1940s, her father's family used to take their baths in the front room every Monday, boiling the water in kettles and bathing the entire family one at a time, maximising the resource. We weren't entirely sure how they decided who took first go at scrubbing clean -- was it decided by who was the dirtiest (with the cleanest going first) or by age? Either way, baths had to be planned.

Just like the candlelight reading sessions in the squat, such affairs were communal. Families united around a precious resource.

Spinning off from that, the talk of impending electricity has triggered new thought. If candlelight unites, then does electricity divide? After all, you can have electricity in each room, you can have it on without a glance or discussion as to who can use it or how much we need, whereas once a candle goes out, you have to replace it in order to continue your activities.

These resource-strapped situations do make you think about what you have and what you need. We wonder if those in their lit apartments with their ample electricity ever wonder about their electrical output in such detail.

Tool colours

Okay, the jailbreak technique isn't working. I'd been putting all my previous days of frustration with the electrics into the nail filing, but clearly don't possess enough annoyance to make an adequate dent in the steel pipes.

We decided today to go with Diagram Drawing Electrician's idea of using an angle grinder tool to slice at the base of each steel pipe (whilst being careful not to cut through the wires). Thanks to a neighbour and their many extension cords, here is USgal with the angle grinder at work. Sparks and noise, the sign of hard work at work, as you can see. She found the entire process exhilarating.

Next tool - The Dremel, here at work on the main steel pipe (referred to by both electricians, as "The Puppy", for this is the one that connects to the outside electricity supply) :

The mysterious Dremel that USgal has been going on about since I arrived. The name of a brand of tool I learned today. Here is our attempt to use the Dremel to slice down the hide of steel. A laborious process, but our shoulder joints are glad for it.

By the way, does this look like five metres to you?

It is, according to the packaging for this extension cord. An alien five metres perhaps. Five metres, maybe, if you had to imagine what five metres looked like.

UPDATE: as of 7.38pm, I have managed to cut through the bases of all of the steel pipes (bar the 5th and 6th, which don't have any connectors anyway). This feels good.

Swaying vs. Diagram

It appears that we are caught in a crossfire between two electricians.

On the one side, we have Swaying Electrician, wobbling away on Sunday night whilst evaluating the work we would need to do to restore electricity. "Just five minutes" is all we need to hack away at the steel casing surrounding the wires, apparently (and certainly not the case, unless we're doing it wrong because we're NOT electricians!) (although, how can you go wrong with sawing??)

And then tonight, there is Diagram Drawing Electrician who lives a few streets away. Diagram Drawing Electrician, who has seen our pipe dilemma for himself and can reproduce our circumstances on A4 lined paper with artistic-recall precision (almost like a human camera). He then talks animatedly about how best to tackle the steel and with what tools whilst engaging with his detailed pen-drawn illustration.

We can only assume there is a rivalry, because occasionally Swaying will make a sideways remark about Diagram Drawing whilst emphasising a point, and vice versa it seems, as we witness a few times tonight (and with neither of them actually present each time to receive their respective insults and thus recoil appropriately). We're just nodding along with both of them. USgal feels she is being talked at, with each one at either ear, her head nothing more than a tunnel for them to shout in.

All we'd like is for the electricity to be sorted out. How frustrating already (candlelight, romantic as it is to read by, can't charge cellphones, for example), and then frustrating some more when experts in the field aren't helping.

If it only takes an electrician five minutes to cut through thick steel pipes, then why not show us, instead of taking five minutes to explain what we have to do? If it's a money thing, perhaps we can pay Swaying with the one-off pen art of his competitor.

Jailbreak

Yep, the equivalent of a nail file is all we have to tackle the thick steel pipes housing the electrics, as you can see.

As you stand on a chair sawing away, you wonder if this is what crooks do whilst in jail, slowly slicing away at the bars on their windows, hoping to see the light. We're hoping to see the light (or any light) in our house, so for that, we're not far removed.

It will just take five minutes

This is the current state of our electricity box :

As you can see from this suitably blurred picture, the fuseboard (which sits above the meter) is missing.

With the wires above it snipped to prevent their connection to the fuseboard, it will be our job to reattach them. To do so, we will need to saw through the metal casing of each pipe in order to pull the wires out.

Here are those electrical pipes close up:

According to a swaying electrician at 11pm tonight, it will take us "just five minutes" to cut through ALL the pipes (there are seven in total, of various widths). We then pull out the wires, hook them up, and we'll have electricity in no time.

In just five minutes.

This from a man who is swaying away, perhaps from being a bit inebriated, as he assesses our dilemma with a torch. I'm not convinced about the assessment he's giving, but then I'm not an electrician. Feeling left in the dark has never felt more appropriate.

Oh, and then Swaying Electrician leaves, and takes all the tools we'd need for the job with him!

Romantic hideout

Second night in, and a second lot of candles to accompany dinner. Having no electricity (or means to revive it, other than the beginner's knowledge that USgal and me are slowly acquiring piecemeal from neighbouring squatters) really does make you think about how we take electricity for granted.

Do the occupants in the lit appartments across the street ever stop to think how lucky they are? Do we ever stop to consider how dependent we are on electricity and how we use it almost without a thought? How did the pre-electricity generation get by?

What has no electricity meant to us so far? :

For one, that candlelight encourages more communal activity. We've read our books together around a single candle in the living room. Reading this way has been almost meditative, contemplative, with nothing but the flicker of flame and street noise to soundtrack us. No distractions to obscure our entertainment.

We've already had some interesting debates by candlelight (eg. "Life without Electricity" or how our home could almost be like the real-world-in-minutae for all the current hot potato political issues right now on energy/conservation/economy).

Eating by candlelight, the texture of the food suddenly becomes apparent. Takeaway kebabs have never felt like pleasure zones for the tongue before.

You can pause for a thought in our flat and find you can really think, nothing to pull you away.

Thanks to the large windows in the living room, we're not completely in darkness. Between the candles and the full moons of late, and we could be in some romantic honeymoon hideout somewhere.