You Don’t Know What You Don’t know!

I have heard this many times and once in a while I have an experience that reemphasizes this. Well I just had one. My background is in Aircraft Electronics. I spent twenty years troubleshooting and teaching it.

Friday I went to bed and set my home heating system down to 69 degrees as normal. Saturday I woke up and my house was extremely cold! I spent about two hours trying to troubleshoot it and I was smart enough not to rip into it to much. So I swallowed my pride and called the repair company. Fortunately it is still under warranty. Now I live in Florida and usually in late Feb I turn off my heater to save energy but we were having below freezing weather.

 

So I spent most of Saturday driving around trying to find a space heater. Plenty of patio furniture but it wan’t until my fourth store that I found a few space heaters left.

 

Well Monday rolled around and the repairman showed up. He quickly did a few of the same checks I did and said you don’t have power to your unit. I said I had concluded the same thing and he asked where my breaker panel was. I took him to it and told him I thought the breaker might be bad but I didn’t have the tools to check it.

 

Well lo and behold I showed the breaker and he said there is your problem. I looked and didn’t see one. I had recycled the breaker and knew it was engaged. He went to an unmarked breaker and flipped it. Bamm the system started to work immediately. Now I was puzzled because I knew the one circuit breaker I had played with does turn the unit on and off. He then told me that I had played with the main breaker but the heating coil had it’s own seperate breaker. I didn’t know that and unless I worked with the heater I wouldn’t know that. What I was doing was turning the Air Conditioning part off and on which is normally more important in Florida.

 

Bottom line, as smart as I am at electricity this is a prime example of, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Know matter how knowledgeable you are on a subject keep studying because you will never know it all!