Improving Your Hotel Room: Two Electrical Issues to Address:

by Edward J. Harshman

When I bought Room 250, it had been occupied by its owner and not on the rental market. My property manager and I noted some deficiencies that had to be corrected before the room was fit to rent, and although the critical ones have been corrected there are still a few (not so important) to address.

Here are two that the prior owners missed:

First, the lack of a lightning arrestor.

Delta lightning arrestors are installed in the circuit-breaker box. They are intended to provide the electrical equivalent of a soft cushion to capture the impulse of a sudden voltage surge, inducing a chemical reaction that quickly reverses itself and resets itself immediately. It is not a perfect preventive of damage to electronics, but in years of experience I have found it highly effective. The cost is about $80 and the installation is fairly straightforward. See deltala.com (and no this is not a paid mention or an advertisement. I like the product.)

Second, the useless wall switch near the kitchen area.

In southwest Florida, there seemed to have been an epidemic of mystery switches: the mystery is what they do. In 250, there was a mystery switch that defied explanation although I tested every light fixture and every outlet. My handyman noted a red wire in one of the outlet boxes (after removing every cover plate and replacing it after inspection), but could not do anything definitive. He did, however, identify the outlet with the unexplained red wire. With some effort, I was able to convert a live outlet to one of which the lower of the two is on the formerly mystery switch and the upper is live. Here's how:

1 Begin in the morning. If you have to make a surprise trip to the hardware store for something, you don't want the delay to force you to work in the dark because you shut off all the lighting.

2 Obtain a flathead screwdriver, a voltmeter, and diagonal cutters.

3 One by one, remove every cover plate from every outlet and look at the wires leading to the outlets. If you see a red one or you see something complicated behind the outlet, then that's where to investigate. Otherwise, the outlet is not connected to the switch at all and you can put the cover plate back on.

4 Expect to have found only one outlet with a red wire. You might find two, conceivably.

5 When you do find such an outlet, turn off the power to it. Confirm the absence of power with a lamp or a voltmeter.

6 Disconnect the red wire and connect it to one terminal of the voltmeter and connect the other terminal of it to a neutral slot in the outlet. (Note: if you see the two slots for an ordinary plug vertically oriented with the ground hole below them, then the neutral side is the left and the power side is the right.)

7 Restore the power and experiment with the mystery switch. Very likely, you will note that the red wire becomes energized, or not, depending on how you position the switch. If not, then the experiment fails and all you can realistically do is put the outlet back together again, leaving everything as you found it.

8 Turn the power off again.

9 Break the connecting bridge on the power side of the outlet with the diagonal cutters.

10 Make sure that the black wire is connected to the top half of the right side pair of screws and connect the red wire to the bottom half, below the black wire.

11 Plug a lamp into the top outlet and connect the voltmeter to the bottom outlet.

12 Turn the power on and test to make sure that the top outlet is always live and the bottom outlet is controlled by the mystery switch.

13 Turn the power off, put the outlet back in the wall, reinstall the cover plate, and turn the power back on again.

14 Return any borrowed tools, then celebrate!

What had happened? Some shockingly inept electricians had originally made all of the wiring connections properly, then didn't break the connecting bridge so as to separate the top half of the outlet pair from the bottom half.

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