Rewiring 59 Cecil Street

Last Wednesday I helped Dickie do some rewiring at May and Judy Eng's mom's place at 59 Cecil Street, not far from the church. My uncle, Jit, actually rents out a room there on the second floor. There are two students who rent out rooms on the third floor according to Dickie.

We were going to lay down some heavy-duty wire from the electrical junction box through the length of the basement up to the third floor kitchen for the new electric stove they bought. The existing 3-burner gas stove they had currently was on it's last legs. Only one of the burners was actually working. So the two girls up there were having a heck of a time trying to cook their meals.

There was already a thinner wire running through the spot Dickie wanted to put the new, heavy duty one in. We decided to use that as a guideline. We attached the new wire from the basement to the end of the old one. But, the hole from the basement through to the main floor was too tight. So Dickie got his drill out and enlarged it slight. Luckily it was big enough to fit.

The new wire was quite heavy. And it was larger in diameter. It's made to carry enough electricity to run a stove or dryer after all. We had a heck of a time pulling it through each of the floors. It was a really slow process. One of us would be pushing up from the floor below, while the other guy would be the floor above pulling. We had to do it floor by floor because there was too much friction to pull straight from the top.

We finally pulled the wire up from the basement to the third floor when we decided we should have about 2-3 more feet of wire up there just in case. So we repeated the whole process (from floor to floor again).

After we did that, Dickie attached the box to accept the plug from the stove to the upper end of the wire and I strung the wire across the length of the basement to the junction box. It was a lot of work. The wire was heavy and not very flexible. Sometimes I would have to pull a long length of it back so it would go the best way around obstacles.

At the end Dickie hooked it up to the junction box. We went upstairs and tested it. Everything was fine. The stove worked well. I'm sure the girls up there will be happy. They now have a stove with four working burners to use.