[georgeoliver]

I had a funny experience a week ago. One night working on a hobby web project it took me three or four hours to debug something, I finally got to bed around midnight thinking "boy, programming is hard".

The next day at work we had to find a broken heat wire in a tiled bathroom floor, running 1000 volts through the wires to try to fuse the broken wire, then heating the floor up and searching with heat-sensitive paper overlays for the likely broken spot, then breaking the tile with a hammer and digging the wire out of the mortar bed. After we found it I thought, "I'd rather hunt software bugs".

[iancmceachern]

I once had to jackhammer a 4 foot wide, 26 foot long, 4 foot deep trench in my basement to replace the sanitary sewer in my house. It was old terracotta pipe and had tree roots growing into it and eventually blocked the flow. It was doing that that helped me be so thankful to have an office job. I also had to lug all the rubble upstairs in 5 gallon buckets.

[CamperBob2]

Didn't you have to bring the rubble back down when it was time to refill the trench? That would've bothered me more than the trips upstairs.

[iancmceachern]

I didn't. It's not good practice to fill in the trench with rubble (rubble is the big chunks of concrete with re-bar still in it, not the dirt). I left the dirt down there, along with any smaller chunks of concrete, anything smaller than a golf ball or so. Good practice states that you should fill the trench directly around the pipe with gravel which i brought down fresh, compact that and then fill dirt on top of that, which I had left down there, and then finally with newly poured concrete and re-bar. Filling in the trench with the rubble would potentially damage the new pipe I just put in. It actually wasn't bad bringing in the new gravel and sacks of concrete because gravity does the work for you. We just opened one of the windows and put two 2x4 boards to make a ramp and slid the bags down that. Just had to carry it from the truck to the window.

[sokoloff]

Does a thermal imaging camera not work for the finding task? That seems like it would be faster, more certain, and less aggravation all around.

[georgeoliver]

Good question, I don't know. The technician on site didn't have one. I guessing the camera would be faster, but the result image about the same. The nice thing about the paper is you easily can check multiple spots at once, so it's faster to divide down to the problem area.

[CamperBob2]

Time-domain reflectometry. To Google it is to love it.

[georgeoliver]

Very cool! The tech did have some device that could measure the distance to the fault when tied into wire upstream, but I'm not sure if it was a TDR, I think he was making more rule of thumb calculations based on the characteristics of the wire. I would say though that between his voltage box, amp box, and general test tools he had the coolest tech on the jobsite in general.