This is an older post (done when I was still on blogger). It was rushed together, so the formatting might make it a bit hard to read.

Well, one of my units is totally electrical, no gas at all. This means that there are wall-mounted electric heaters. Nell called and let me know that the heater in the kitchen wasn't working, although it was working in all the other rooms. Hmmmm....

So, I went over to the house and took a look. My fear was that the house circuit to the heater was bad, which meant a lot of work trying to debug it. As I've learned, the first thing to do is check for obvious problems. From the outside, everything looked okay, no visible problems. Doh! If I'm going to go into the unit, itself, then the first step is to turn off power it. Flip the breaker, so I don't get electrocuted and unscrew the only visible screw that was holding it to the wall. I figured that I'd just take it off and look behind it, see if there was anything I could see that might keep it from working.
When the screw came out of the wall (with difficulty, I might add, kudos to my screwdriver!), the heater didn't come off the wall. The screw was on one end of the heater (the end opposite the switch to control the temperature), so I figured there must be another screw holding it onto the wall where the heat switch was. Hmm... No screw immediately obvious. The temperature switch was on the outside of a little compartment that appeared to have the screw in it (from the back that is what it appeared). So, I fiddled around with the little compartment, and, sure enough, it came off, exposing the wires that were connected to the temperature switch. There was definitely a screw inside there holding the heater to the wall. I looked at all the wires, trying to figure out what the path of the circuit was through the heater, and I noticed that, oddly enough, one of the wires was disconnected from the switch. I looked at the wires, diagramming the circuit in my mind, and, sure enough, that wire shouldn't have been disconnected. My theory was that I just needed to reconnect the wire and everything should work. Unfortunately, the wires weren't screwed to the switch, but the connector was broken. Doh! I figured that I could just take the switch to Home Depot and get a new one, reconnect it and be home free. Before I took the switch off, though, I needed to make a note of the circuit, so I could reconnect it in the same way. Naturally, I didn't have a piece of paper with me, so I called Mary and dictated the circuit to her. I disconnected the switch and took it to Home Depot. Sadly, Home Depot did not have this switch, and the place that would have it wouldn't be open until Monday (it was Saturday when I did this). The only other option was to solder the wire back onto the switch. Well, such is life. I bought a soldering iron, took the switch home and reconnected the wire. After calling Mary to get the connections, I reconnected everything, turned the breaker back on, then moved the switch to High! I waited a bit, hoping to get some indication of heat. No change in color in the coil, but I did notice that the metal started to creak. That meant to me that it was heating up. So, I turned it off, put the compartment back on with the switch, reconnected the heater to the wall, and left. I called Nell a bit later, and, sure enough, the heater was working. Job well done!!!!