this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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My favorite is when one of the switches does nothing you can visibly see and you never find out what it’s for.
Had one of those. Eventually figured out that a prior owner had a lamppost in the yard. How did I figure that out? I found the buried romex. Not conduit. Romex.
I’m no electrician and even I know that you don’t bury Romex lmao. Good lord.
Edit: now that I think about it, the previous homeowner of my house used to have a fountain out front that has since been decommissioned… I found the wiring for it in a box under some gravel around where the fountain was.
There is direct burial cabling, so that could have been it. (Not Romex branded, but same thing)
I don't think they want my European curiosity
It's beautiful 🥹
It’s just grey colored 3-4 conductor cabling.
I still like putting it in conduit so you don’t have to worry about someone hitting it with a shovel.
You see it under porches and decks with power outlets a lot too.
Huh, TIL.
The yellow sheathed cable can be buried. The cheap white stuff cannot, at least not for long.
Till some guy in Germany calls you and tells you to cut it out.
No shit, an old house I moved into had about half the lights just hard wired to mains so they were always on. They had the switch runner in the box, but it wasn't connected when I moved in so the switches did nothing. The previous tenants just screwed and unscrewed the bulbs (I rewired them correctly).
Still to this day I will lay in bed and wonder how in the ever loving fuck this happened, who did it, what they were thinking, if it was intentional, and then come to the terrifying realization that the person or people involved in this are probably still out there somewhere, operating motor vehicles on public roads, putting us all in danger. They probably even think they are smart. I mean they do their own electrical work after all.
Screw haunted houses, this is a real cursed house
What I want to know is what is the science called of placing outlets and switches exactly where furniture goes?
You've heard of the Chinese art on Feng Shui? The Chinese art of locating outlets and switches in places that get covered by furniture is called Fook Uho. Every interior designer studies that.
Good design? Maybe during the Great Depression when a home had one light bulb and one radio.
The majority of those $5 extension cords are generally a fire waiting to happen. They are useful if you plug nothing more than a lamp in to one. Nor should one just leave them lay about on the floor, behind furniture or not.
Source: retired firefighter that has been to more than one electrical caused house fire as 2am.
I just use speaker cable and skin the ends with my teeth and jam the ends in the outlet.
We've all been there haven't we.
I bought my house two years ago and it had been retrofitted with baseboard radiators. They covered up the lower receptacles in every outlet so you could only get a plug into the top one and then the wire ran over a hot radiator. Just mind-boggling that anybody could do that and not see a problem with it. Granted, the outlets were embedded in the cinderblock walls so it wasn't an easy matter to move them up, but laziness kills.
For good measure, these plugs were not grounded and they all had the polarity reversed.
Oooo! The Landlord's cousin special!
What the actual fuck lmao.
There's always one that needs to be turned on for any of the other switches to function, too.
Who the fuck does electrical wiring around you guys' parts?
Americans
Uh ... Have you seen the crews that build houses?
Lowest bidder Americans.
My brother lives in an apartment with one of those. We only found out it's supposed to go to a ceiling light when I moved into the same complex, and my place had the same switch
Merry Christmas and a Happy 1985.
I got a home this year I had one like that, the wiring was wrongly attached to an outlet that didn’t have the tab broken. Took while to figure out.