In my last post, I alluded to some less-than-stellar wiring practices en mi entorno. For my opening statement, I will present some pictures of my house, where the wiring is excellent by local standards.
Here’s an example of typical utilitarian construction practices. The wiring is thrown on as an afterthought, because the walls are cinderblocks and there’s no way to tunnel through them. It’s a little upsetting to see the wiring, but no harm no foul. The electric outlet that corresponds to these wires suffered from a problem whereby I would receive an electric shock whenever I touched a metal part of anything that was plugged into it. For example, if I plugged my laptop in, I would receive a buzz if I touched a USB port. I was able to fix this problem by taking apart the outlet and rearranging it such that a contact stopped making contact with the frame of the outlet.
Here’s a junction point—but the junctions are covered well with electric tape, so I’m unconcerned. Many people in the community run these wires from one house to another, where they are exposed to rainwater and the elements. These wires are typically at the level of my forehead. This answers the age-old question, “how does one get Sebastian to really watch where he’s going?”
My electric shower. I installed this baby myself, one of the accomplishments that I’m most proud of since arriving in this wonderful country. Notice that the shower is wired in parallel with the light bulb, so it only works when the light is on. You know it has kicked in when the light dims a bit. Some astute readers (hi, Dustin) will notice that the ground line goes nowhere (but is at least well covered with electric tape). You see, in Ecuador, ground is the person taking the shower.
Side note: I bought the ultra deluxe shower head. The one manufactured in Brazil, not the one from Columbia which was half the price. What I failed to take into account upon purchase was that I don’t speak Portuguese. If I were to write a book of advice, it would certainly contain an entry titled “don’t do electrical work that involves reading manuals that are written in languages that you don’t speak.” But I got it done, and boy was it sweet to take that first hot shower.
Now that you have seen my shower setup (which is pretty much as ideal as you can get in these parts), I want you to imagine what my shower experience was like when I lived in my training community near Cayambe for 2+ months. I want you to imagine shivering, naked, in a filthy bathroom. You turn the knob and are now watching water leaking out the top of the shower head and running over both of the electric cables, which are shoddily insulated (bare wire visible in places). The bathroom light flickers menacingly.
Then imagine the decision that I had to make every day: Shower with freezing cold water (and it was FREEZING cold—when I mention to people here that I lived in Cayambe, the first thing they say is “it’s freezing there!”), or run the risk of death-by-electrocution and shower with tepid water. And I want to emphasize the word tepid. It wasn’t even worth the risk of death. I think that it’s understandable that I reverted to showering with cold water every 3 days or so, rather than running the risk.
In closing, my thesis is that the electric wiring here is terrifying. To round out the evidence, I present a photo of the wiring that runs into my building:
You will notice that the insulation has peeled away, making a short-circuit quite likely if the wires get wet. The good news is that this particular wiring is protected by an overhang, so the risk is minimal.
P.S. I live on the first floor of the building, and the doctors that work at the dispensary live on the second floor from Monday through Thursday (they escape to Quito for the weekends). The top floor has a similar electric shower head. It turns out that these shower heads pull so much current that if they are both activated simultaneously, the circuit breaker that we have in common is tripped, and we both end up taking simultaneous cold showers :( :( :(.
I’m not proud to say that it took 3 occurrences of this phenomenon for me to pinpoint the cause for the power spontaneously going out while I was showering. Now I take afternoon showers so that there is no resource-allocation conflict.
Good God man, I hope you threw the breaker or pulled the fuse when you were taking apart outlets. Surely the houses have that safety feature at least. Ah, nevermind, your final paragraph mentions the breaker tripping when 2 showers occur simultaneously.
I really can't say why they don't run the wiring down through the cinderblock cores to outlet level. You'd still have access to the wires at the top and it'd be hidden/protected in the hollow of the blocks. You'd have to knock out a hole for the outlet itself, but that's not that big of a deal. Oh well.
Wow, wiring up a electric showerhead on shoddy wiring, in series to an exposed lightbulb, with no ground connection, based upon directions written in Portuguese. And you probably had less than ideal tools to boot. I get nervous enough replacing a fixture/fan here with a tick tracer/multimeter on hand. I'm pointing joey at this post to give any advice he may be able to regarding your wiring (or lack thereof).
Good luck with that, and (although you already know this) DON'T touch that showerhead while in use, the fact that you're alive says something but a breaker really isn't adequate to protect you in this situation. You need a Ground Fault Interrupter (think about those reset switches you saw in bathrooms here in the US). You could probably pick one up for cheap and wire it into the circuit yourself, just get one with directions in a language you could order pizza in.