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Comment by hondo77 | Hacker News Reader

So you haven't done bug fixes on something poorly architected initially because the project was started by anyone with a pulse instead of someone experienced?

Same with electrical. Yeah, you can learn the basics but only experience is going to get you to do it right. And two months ain't enough experience to do all the new construction electrical for someone else's house. Doing it for yourself is fine because only you have to deal with what you didn't do completely right when you didn't know any better.

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You will sell your house someday, so doing it yourself has more than just personal implications, which is why inspections are required.

But you're wrong about the experience required. Everything you do in a house gets done repeatedly. A modicum of code knowledge, a good reference book, some simple math to calculate loads, some skill with power tools, and a lot of patience. No problem.

There are zero surprises in a house, the requirements are 100% predictable. Get it inspected, of course, because QA is always beneficial. Be careful, but don't be afraid of it, it's not magical or malevolent.

What passes inspection is only a tiny subset of what is "right and fine and will never cause problems".

The whole point of codes and inspections is to eliminate thinking and turn the subjective into the qualitative.

I don't know what point you're making here.

You can learn to do competent, inspection-passing, code-compliant, and never-problem-causing electrical work, adequate for wiring a full house, in less than a week.

From your other comments, I think we agree. Apologies if I've misunderstood your points.

I meant to reply to the genius one comment up. He's clearly got no experience hence why he's putting this stuff on a pedestal.

That's exactly my point. Troubleshooting an intermittent problem on a bathroom fan in a subdivided triple decker with common grounds -> hard.

Doing the wiring in a new house (yours or otherwise) -> easy.

The fact that you're making a mountain out of a mole hill her really just screams that you have no experience with ANY of this. The stuff that's hard to "do right" is the stuff that you get one shot at (like concrete) or stuff where the feedback loop is very long (it may take decades to find out that your poor flashing job is letting water in and ruining your siding). The stuff the internet likes to screech about like plumbing and electrical and framing are way easier to validate the quality of because you can test them or because problems will become obvious quickly.

> Troubleshooting an intermittent problem on a bathroom fan in a subdivided triple decker with common grounds -> hard

I would generalize that to "locating and safely fixing problems inside closed walls or ceilings -> sometimes hard".

Sometimes easy still, but that is where things get complicated, and sometimes dangerous. I've found dead-ended intermittent lines left inside walls without any attempt at proper termination, for example. This is how fires start.

Doing your own electrical work exposes you to the lazy errors made by other people in the past. You learn not to be those people (some of whom were licensed electricians).

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