One house,
wired up

0of 14 faults found

0.0 s

Broken, then fixed, then better

The drawing opens on a phone call. The house is built and lived in, but the wiring is wrong: the van comes down the street, and the survey marks fourteen defects from the yard to the attic — a Federal Pacific panel on a 100-amp service, a rusted mast, aluminum branch wiring, two-prong outlets, no GFCI at the counter or the bath, no detectors, knob-and-tube in the attic. Then the old panel fails and the house goes dark.

The work runs the way a real job does. The roof, the second floor and everything inside come off; the first-floor walls stay, because the wiring is cut into them. The ground rods go in, then the meter-main and the new distribution box, then the house is wired room by room — chases cut, cable pulled inside the walls, boxes, devices, lights, appliances — and every room is switched off and on again before the work climbs a floor. Each fault clears the moment the work that fixes it lands.

Everything in the house is on a switch that actually switches it: click a switch plate, or the washer, the dryer, the range or the TV. Open the panel to throw the breakers and watch the room on the camera. Storm runs the outage: lightning takes the pole, the battery catches the house, the generator takes over, and the pole and the service are rebuilt. Line is the drawing and Color the render; Day is when the work happens, Night is when what it bought you shows.

Chapters

As found · the fourteen

The schedule · room, load, circuit, breaker

The drawing is organized the way a panel schedule is. Every room is a list of things that draw power, every one of those sits on a circuit, and every circuit is a breaker you can throw — here, or on the panel itself. Throwing one opens the panel and puts the camera in the room it feeds.

Every service in the scene

A working drawing, not final art. Conductors are drawn heavier than scale so a run reads across a room, and wiring devices and the distribution box are drawn half again life size, so the two are not to the same ruler. In this drawing red is a hot, blue the second hot on a 240-volt circuit, white the neutral and green the ground; the store’s three-phase feeders are black, red and blue. The house and the store are designed for this drawing rather than copied from a real address, and the vehicles are original designs. Colorado and Denver enforce the 2026 NEC (since August 1, 2026); code references are to that edition.