William Lego Electrical Services

William Lego Electrical Services I am a residential electrician who specializes in upgrading and repairing the electrical systems of older houses to keep them safe and up-to-date.

03/31/2025

Please, if you need to contact me message or call me at 815 7422065. Thank you-Wm. Lego

11/13/2024

Say Sparky, a lightbulb tristed off and left the stub in the socket. What to do?

Dear Stubbed, first unplug the lamp, or turn off the wall switch. If wall switched turn off the breaker. Use a pair of needle nosed plyers thusly: insert the nose of the plyers inside the socket and forcibly open the plyers to grip the broken bulb base from the inside. Lefty Lucy, and the bulb base will unscrew.

11/03/2024

Say Sparky, a large tree limb snapped the feed wires leading to the house. The wires seem to be broken only at the points where they linked to my house wiring just beyond the weatherhead. The riser pipe leading down to the meter appears OK. I was required to replace the wires inside the riser pipe before the electric company would reconnect me. Why?
-Dark in Decatur.

Dear Dark. When a falling limb breaks wiring connections, the insullation on the wire inside the riser may have also been damaged. Reconnecting could cause fireworks inside your riser pipe, damaging the pipe and giving you something else to replace. You wasted no money on replacing these wires.

11/25/2022

‘Tis the season for hanging lights. Be extremely careful on ladders. Even among professionals the ladder is the most dangerous tool in our trucks. Have that son or grandson earn their keep this Christmas.

03/09/2021

Say Sparky, I am contemplating buying a fully electric car, and I am concerned about how I get it charged. I have a small house with a 100-amp 240 volt service. Will I need to make major changes to charge my EV? –To be Juiced in Joliet

Dear Juiced, If you want to go thoroughly on the cheap you need make no changes to your home electrical system. Most EV’s come with 120 volt charger an no additional cost. The good news is that it is free. The bad news is that it takes 16 hours or better to charge your car. If you need the car daily and are charging from near empty, this wouldn’t do. This basic charger can be plugged into any 120 volt outlet in your garage. It is called a Type 1 or Level 1 charger.
​The next step up in chargers is the Level 2 charger. This is a 240 volt charger that can either be installed in your home or found commercially, say at your employer’s parking lot. If The Boss supplies such chargers at no cost, you are in luck…for now. If your fellow employees decide to also get EV’s then unless you’re an early riser, you may find yourself SOL when arriving at the workplace chargers. They may all be occupied. Most EV owners that I know charge at home with Level 2 chargers. A 100-amp home service will handle any Level 2 charger, providing you aren’t make additional huge electrical demands on your system. If you’re also running an electric water heater, drying clothes with an electric dryer, have a dozen baseboard electric heaters cranked up, and your wife has every burner and the oven on with the electric stove, you’d probably trip your main breaker. That’s an extreme “Doctor it hurts when I do this…” case. Most charging is done at night, so most of this additional loading will not occur. Having an in-home, Level 2 charger usually means additional expense to run heavy cable from your main electrical panel to a 14-50 Receptacle in your garage. A level 2 charger usually requires the same wiring that you would use for a large electric stove/oven combination. If your main electrical panel is in your garage next to where you’ll be putting your charger, you hit the charger lottery. If your main breaker panel is 75’ away from the garage and you have to run cable through the attic, then you’ve bought the typical ticket. A Level 2 charger will typically charge your car in 6-8 hours, making it the preferred level for in-home, overnight charging.
​Finally there is the Level 3 fast charging available in public places. Some Level 3 is offered “free” as a perk or incentive to drive green. A Level 3 charger will “fill you up” in under an hour. Many Level 3 chargers charge for the charge. Since we’re still in the Wild West days of car charging, there are a variety of fee levels and ways of determining fees. Educate yourself on what you are paying for and how to determine if the fees are in line with your expectations. In 50 years we’ll all have instinctive feelings about what we should be paying for a kwh of charge and be able to brag about our kwh/100 mile rate.
​Welcome to the 21st Century. Enjoy your ride.

08/01/2020

Say Sparky, some weird stuff here in Loves Park. I live in a 1950’s home. I’ve been running the central air quite a bit lately, and when it shuts off, outlets at various places in the house no longer work while other outlets seem unaffected. A couple hours later every thing is back to normal…until the AC runs again then the problem repeats. The wiring looks OK where it comes into the pipe near the roofline,so no tree damage that I can see. Could it have something to do with Covid?
-Half out of it in Loves Park

Dear Half-Out, first I’d rule out anything to do with COVID, or alien DNA for that matter. From your description I have generated a theory. A central A/C unit can easily draw as much power as the rest of the house combined. When it kicks on it causes a lot of current to be drawn through the main wires feeding your house. Three wires come into a house to provide the 240 volts required for an air conditioner and the 120 volts for your outlets. The two insulated wires each are charged with 120 volts. Between either of these wires and the bare neutral wire there is 120 volts. This voltage is used to run most small, plug-in household appliances. Between the two insulated wires you have 240 volts. This voltage is required for your A/C, electric clothes dryer, and electric water heater. For electricity to get from the electric company to your appliance, it needs good clean connections from utility to your outlet. Where connections are out in the weather they are prone to oxidize and resist the flow of electricity into your house. The little cylindrical aluminum connectors linking your house to the utility wiring become highly suspect. Oxidized connections generate heat as the electricity flows through. Heated connections expand, causing more heat, causing more expansion, and so on. At some point the connection expands so much that it breaks the circuit, and in your case the air conditioner quits. The A/C is not properly cycling off, it is just quitting because the flow of electricity to it has been interrupted. This accounts for some of the 120 volt outlets going out and others staying on at the same time. The outlets being fed by the other 120 volt line coming into your house would not be affected. When the expanded connectors cool, the connection is re-established and everything works as it should …until the A/C kicks in and again causes the circuit to open. The faulty connectors are the power company’s responsibility. They will re-establish them. You have smart meters in your area. The power company can see remotely when you have one or both 120-volt lines to your house interrupted. Sparky’s suggestion: turn the A/C down so it will run continuously and cause the problem. Have a little lamp plugged into one of the outlets that had gone out before. When the A/C quits and the lamp goes out, call the power company. They will be able to verify the problem remotely. They will then send someone out to fix it.
-Good Luck.

06/23/2020

Say Sparky, I have refrigerator problems. We just had our basement finished, and we were ready for a new refrigerator to cool the kids’ drinks. We are on our third non-functional refrigerator delivered from the same store. With this last refrigerator I had to sign a waiver that I could not return it once the delivery men were convinced that it worked. When the unit was carried to the basement, plugged in and turned on, the delivery men waited about 45 minutes, they sat in the basement and called me down every 15 minutes to verify that the light was working and the refrigerator was cooling. They put a glass of water in both the refrigerator section and the freezer section. At the end of their stay the water in both sections was quite cold. The freezer water had a skim of ice. The unit was performing just as it should. The men left. I loaded up the refrigerator with drinks, and by the next afternoon it was no longer cooling. The interior light works just fine but no cold! What gives?!
Puzzled in Pecatonica

Dear Puzzled, this is one of those electrical problems that is not really an electrical problem. Just piecing together some hunches here, I’m thinking that your basement finishers “had their own electrician.” I think that they probably connected the refrigerator outlet to the switched side of the basement light circuit. It is highly unlikely that three refrigerators would exhibit the same faults. I’m thinking that when you go upstairs and turn off the basement lights lights, you are also turning off the refrigerator. As soon as you go to the basement and turn on the lights, you are also turning on the refrigerator. Of course when you open the refrigerator door, the interior light goes on also. The motor is running also, by since the refrigerator has been off since you last went to the basement, the interior is not cool. Try taking a flashlight to make your way to the basement. I’ll bet when you open the refrigerator in the dark basement, there will be no light in the refrigerator.
Call a bonafide electrician and tell him you need an always-on outlet for your refrigerator. He’ll fix you up.

05/16/2020

Say Sparky, I planned on installing a new light fixture, but I couldn’t find the breaker to shut off the circuit. I finally shut off the main breaker to install the fixture. I thought every circuit was protected by a breaker. What’s going on here?
-Juiced in Joliet

Dear Juiced, sometimes two hot wires on different circuits are mistakenly connected together. If these circuits are on opposite halves of the phase, they are 240 volts apart, and you get two breakers rapidly snapping open when they sense the rush of current brought on by the dead short. If both circuits are on the same phase half, they have no voltage difference between them, and the reenergized circuits will appear to function normally. The problem with this arrangement is that you are effectively assigning a 40 amp breaker to protect wire designed to carry half this load. You can locate interconnected circuits by first turning off all individual circuits in the main panel. Leave the main on. With your newly installed light turned on, begin by flipping the breakers on one by one. When you come to the first breaker that turns on your light, mark it, turn it off, then continue flipping breakers until your light turns on again. Just to be sure that there’s not a third circuit involved, repeat the process until you have tried all breakers. Assuming just two breakers activated your light, you now know which two circuits are interconnected. As for finding just wherein lies the point of interconnection …that’s a subject for another day.

05/08/2020

Say Sparky, I am replacing switches and outlets in my 1950’s house. I have a a set of lights that is controlled by three switches. Any one of the switches will turn the lights on or off. One of the switches has four connecting screws on it. When I replaced it, the other two switches would not work. Any hints?
-Not knowing which switch is which in Sandwich

Dear Switched, it sounds like you need to switch switches. I think you mistakenly installed a double pole switch for a four-way switch. Both switches have four connecting screws, though their interior mechanisms are different. Step one: buy a 4-way switch. Step two: note two pairs of wires in your junction box. Step three: fasten one pair of wires to the top pair of screws and the other pair of wires to the bottom pair of screws. Providing you have the other two switches in the system properly wired, the system will work.

03/06/2020

Say Sparky, I’m finishing my basement, and I want to wire for a three way switch at bottom and top of the stairs. Now there is only a top switch. I’m going to have an electrician connect the switches. I just need to know what sort of wiring I need to put in the wall before I close it up. -Studded in Sterling.

Dear Studded. Good thinking to pull the wire before closing the wall. Install a junction box where you want the switch at the bottom of the stairs. Turn off the breaker feeding the upper box. Pull a three conductor cable with ground from old box with existing switch to the new box. This cable will have a white, a red, a black, and a bare ground wire in it. Leave 8” of cable in each box. Reassemble the old switch in the old box, and Re-energize the circuit. The electrician will take it from there.

12/25/2019

Say Sparky, I would like to replace electrical outlets in my old house. The wiring is all in conduit, and it is stranded wire which makes it difficult to keep in place when I tighten the lug screws on the outlets. The strands want to squeeze out from under the screws. Any suggestions?
-Feeling frayed in Farmington

Dear Frayed, Easy solution here. Use “back wire” outlets. They have provisions for bring the wire in the back of the outlet (hence the name.). The stripped ends of the wire are inserted under a small plate beneath each screw. As the screws are tightened the stripped ends are trapped in little detents under the plate. The strands are then neatly compressed together for a solid connection.
Take a minute to view a YouTube about “pigtailing” the connections also. Pigtailing prevents the failure of one outlet from affecting others on the same circuit.
The back wired outlets cost a bit more -about $2 per unit at this writing, as opposed to 30 cents for the least expensive-but they are usually made of a more durable plastic and have a nice steel backbone running their length. In short they are a much higher quality outlet.
Check also if your community requires tamper proof outlets and just where you should install GFCI outlets.
A few final suggestions. Turn off the breaker on the circuit you’re wiring, and test by reenergizing the circuit every two outlets you’ve wired. This way if you’ve introduced a short, you only have two places to look.
Good luck, and work safe.

10/27/2019

Say Sparky, I bought an occupancy sensor for my son’s room. It seemed the perfect solution to saving my climbing the stairs several times a day to turn off his lights. The instructions insist that I connect the device to a ground wire in the switch junction box. We live in a 1950’s house with no ground wires. I thought this was just the typical manufacturer’s CYA feature in all DIY electrical instructions, so I installed the detector like I have installed switches in the house, with no ground. The detector doesn’t work. Help!
- Still climbing in Caledonia

Dear Climbing, an occupancy sensor, unlike a common switch, is an energy consuming appliance. Though the energy requirement is tiny, it still must be satisfied. All appliances require a hot, 120 volt wire and a neutral wire. That’s why all plugs have at least two prongs. In modern residential wiring a third ground wire is also run with the hot and neutral. The ground wire acts as a safety belt device. If a 120 volt wire touches a grounded switch box, a circuit is completed, and the rush of current causes the circuit breaker to trip or the fuse to blow, turning off the current flow. The ground wire is intended to be used as an emergency safety device only. Electricity, however, does not know intent. A ground wire will carry current just as well as a neutral. When a ground wire is carrying current it energizes all equipment surfaces that it is designed to protect. The amount of current required by an occupancy sensor is far smaller than the amount of current required for a space heater, so touching the ground would not be felt under usual circumstances. According to all accepted electrical practices it is never OK, regardless of the amount of current, to use grounding wires and conduits as neutral conductors. I can only guess that the writer of the occupancy sensor instructions was not too well versed in safe electrical practices. Try using a neutral wire in the switch box rather than the prescribed ground. The sensor should work just fine. If you have no neutral wire, then the occupancy sensor will not work and you will have to find solace in how ripped your calves will look with all that stair climbing.

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Rockford, IL
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