Building a new deck #6: Finishing the deck surface and fixing the electric problems

Well I finally got the electric problems taken care of and so i screwed down the last two deck boards. These boards butt up against the two light poles. And I did the finish cutting of the curve.

So here are the details:

I mentioned earlier, I believe in the first blog of this series that I installed a GFCI circuit breaker in the fuse panel and i was having problems where it kept tripping whenever i put a load on the circuit. Even a load as small as a Dusk to Dawn switch with nothing else.

LumberJock Richard Williams stated that he wished that he was closer so that he could find my problem. Without me paying his plane fare from Las Vegas I did the next best think. I asked him for his phone number so I could call. He replied. I called.

I told him all of the things that I had tried and that had failed. He suggested a couple of things to try. Verfy that the bare ground wire was not touching the white wire anywhere in the circuit. (I didn’t think I had that problem) Replace the buss bar that was in the circuit sub panel. (Mine was very rusty). This discussion was going on in a 3” rain storm, so I was not too interested is stepping outside at that moment.

The next day I was returning home from taking my son to school, and I was running the circuit through my mine. One of the things that Richard has said was that a GFCI breaker is measuring the amount of current that was going through the black (hot) wire and then checking that the reverse of that was going through the neutral wire (white) of the other wave of the alternating current. (These are my words and not necessarly his exact words). I was wondering in my mind about how that was working on the circuit that I had installed.

I then realized that I might have hooked it up incorrectly. (I had never read the instructions, Because I assumed that it was hooked up the same as a regular circuit breaker.) I had hooked up the black wire to the GFCI breaker. I was suppose to also hook up the white wire to another terminal on the GFCI breaker. I had failed to do that. So what was happening was that any load that I put on the black wire was not being offset through the white wire, because I had not attached it to the GFCI breaker.

When I removed the white wire from the buss bar and attached it to the correct terminal on the GFCI breaker, my circuit worked as designed. The Dusk to dawn switch does not trip it, a light bulb does not trip. (I have not put my finger across the terminal to see if it does trip it. Like a SawStop you hope it works)

Once I got all of the electric wiring problems I screwed down the final two deck boards

I cut the angle off the deck to match the sidewalk around the Solarium.

I measured the curve for the end of the deck. I found that it was a 22’ radius. So I had my wife hold the tape measure and I inscribed the curve with a pencil. I then used my Bosch Jigsaw to cut the curve to the line that I had drawn.

We set up a table and chairs and had supper tonight on the deck. It was chilly but we didn’t care.

The supervisor checking to see if we left any scraps on the deck. (As if anything would get as far as the deck surface when he’s hanging around)

So now on to the benches.

-- Retired in Delaware