Relative Something

The mystery of the shocking news is resolved… sort of. I did not have the pleasure of being present yesterday during the visit from an electrician. By the time I got home, everything was solved. Just like that, …solved. I should be pleased, but I am frustrated. I have yet to receive a thorough explanation.

I did have a brief opportunity to speak with the electrician when Cyndie called me at work and put me on speaker phone. He provided me with the news that it wasn’t just the gutter that was energized. That’s almost funny, in hindsight. At first, it was remarkable that the problem wasn’t just the downspout, but it was the entire gutter. Now the electrician was telling me that the soffit and fascia was floating at the live voltage.

We decided on a plan where he would go up into our attic and look for a possible wire in the vicinity of the soffit. My thought, after I hung up the phone, was that the attic on this hot, humid day would be a miserable place. He must have had the same thought.

Cyndie explained later that he decided on his own to do some other investigating before climbing into the attic. He reviewed, once again, which lights, in which rooms, were being fed electricity by the wire on the circuit breaker which we had discovered was energizing the gutter. Then he began to remove the covers from the switches and outlets in the room with an outside wall. This is where it gets a little cloudy.

Somehow, he identified the wire that was feeding electricity to the soffit. He disconnected it and capped it off. Then he pulled in a new wire to replace the one he terminated.

So, it is fixed. All our circuit breakers are back on, and the soffit and gutters are not electrified. But I still don’t know where the (now dead) wire makes contact with something that is tied to the soffit, nor how long that situation has existed.

Something tells me I will be making a little expedition up into my attic in the near future. My curiosity is peaked. However, I’m not so curious that I can’t wait until maybe September to find out.