In's & Out's

[Luckymic34]

In's
-Talking your wife into letting you get a new air compressor and tools to do the much needed body work on your truck
-Then talking her into letting you get a new welder too

Out's
-Finding out the circuit breaker in you apartment garage is too small to run either one of them
-Offering the apartment maintance guy cash to replace it and finiding out it cant be replaced
-Submitting your 1 year lease renewel 1 month earlier

[1969 GMC]

In
talking to my g/f about my truck, or how to properly maintain hers, and NOT have her fall asleep

Out
falling asleep while my g/f talks about her stuffed bears

[dinnut]

got any friends? take it to their house and use lol

[old Rusty C10]

lucky talk the wife into getting a generator to run em, run the generator which will pi$$ off the neighbors get kicked out buy a house with a large garage problems solved!!!

[my new 72]

He lives in Cali, unless you got a few hundred k to lend em I don't think that is an option.

[Glen]

IN.....
Giving air tools, compressors, and welders to board members you never met because you cant use them in your apartment.

OUT.....

Having to go out and buy air tools........etc.

[1972C10]

Sureley you can add a larger breaker .. that or tap into the main bars and put a 4 space breaker box in as an add on.

[walker]

Sounds to me like you need to buy a welding generator. Mine will run my compressor and tools with many amps to spare. Plus, you get a nice welder.
Or, move to Phoenix where housing is still reasonable.

[Luckymic34]

The entire building (about 30 apartments) is all on the same breaker. It controls the lights and the garage door opener and that's it. Apparently they designed it so thats all you could power. That and the room where the breaker is, is locked. So everytime I try to run the compressor I knock out power to the entire building and no one can get into their garage...and now the maintance guy knows it's me.

[joerocks]

quick redneck fix for ya kinda crude but it might work




go to lowes or home depot buy your own breaker box and cut up an extension cord to plug into the wall and everytime you flip your own breaker just flip it back and keep welding problem solved-joe

[Randy70C-10]

Tim, cool to hear that you got new toys, sucks that you can't use them. Does the base have an auto hobby shop that you can do body work at?

[Baradium]

Originally posted by 1972C10
Sureley you can add a larger breaker .. that or tap into the main bars and put a 4 space breaker box in as an add on.

NO!

I worked in electrical wiring for a while, wiring houses etc as they were being built. The breaker is sized due to the size of the wiring in the building! If you put a bigger breaker in to increase load, you seriously risk a fire becuase you will overload the wiring!

If you are going to put a larger breaker on, you want to run the wire from there that can handle the load. Which as you see isn't feasible for him to do.


They went with the cheapest way to do it. That's why it's like that. I did a lot of wiring in townhouses before... but those tended to actually have thier own dedicated boxes for ease of billing.

They looked at what they expected the load to be in there and put the minimum amount of wiring in to do it.

Fairly standard practice.

If it's a lot of outlets together it might be 12 guage wiring. They won't have put any more than that though. 12 and 14 are the most common for the normal wiring. If they thought they could get away with 14 guage they might have tried, but that seems like a lot of stuff to be on one breaker for even 12 guage wiring so I doubt it's 14. Seems a little odd that it's 30 apartment garages on that. Must've just assumed that most of them wouldn't be running at any given time. If it's not a dedicated box with a main breaker blowing it just seems really wierd that they'd pass inspection like that.

IIRC we limited to 3 outlets on one breaker and a garage had to have it's own circuit breaker.

It doesn't add up IMHO.

Get a GCFI tester and see what it says when you run the test. Maybe it's a GFI circuit and you have a fault in your equipment... doesn't seem likely that they'd both have a ground fault though.

-Ryan

[1972C10]

That wasnt what i was talkin about read my post again..

What I was sayin is add a larger breaker to a non used space


Or that he could take a 4 space breaker box and add it on
That would be 4 more breakers dedicated to whatever it woulndt be makin a breaker larger to keep from trippin it would be Addin on a whole entire circuit .


I was suggesting that he add it onto the main bars that are supplying the existiing breaker box wich should be around 4 gauge

[sneakysnake]

might make yourself an extension cord and use the dryer plug,
did that once, have to make a schedule with the Ol' lady not to work on your truck on laundry day .lol