This morning I put on my Electrician’s hat. I needed to fix a fan to be able to put it back into service.  The goats had chewed through the wire when I left the fan sitting in the barn over the winter. (Lesson number whatever: Don’t leave cords anywhere the goats can get to them.)

A visit with the nice man in the electrical department at Home Depot resulted in the purchase of this very cool plug and the wire strippers which I used to strip the wire (Duh!). It’s a good thing I didn’t need a very long cord. Wire strippers are an interesting tool.  Push too hard, and they will cut your wire clean through. Get too agressive with your stripping action and you will break some of the little copper wires that are inside the soft plastic outer coating as you are trying to strip the coating off.  I found both of these things out by experience, and each time, my fan cord got a little shorter!  With a bit of perseverance and holding my mouth just right, I finally exposed the wires without breaking them.

The next trick was to figure out which wire went on which screw. As you can see even in my blurry picture (sorry), there is a silver screw and a gold screw. Anytime two things are different like this is means that it MATTERS which wire you put where. So…. I did what I always do when I have these sorts of questions:  I called The Welder.  Unfortunately, he wasn’t available; I had to figure it out by myself.

It was at this point that I blessed the day that I was born a girl because this allowed me to do something that I would not have been able to do had I been born a boy.  I read the directions that came with the plug.  Very enlightening.  Everyone go find one of these little 2 part cords to look at.  I’ll wait …..

What the directions pointed out to me is that on these cords, one side of the white plastic wire covering is smooth, and the other side (for the other wire) of the plastic has little ridges on it.  By golly, I looked at my fan cord and it was TRUE! The two sides were different!  The wire in the RIBBED plastic tubing goes on the silver screw, and the wire in the SMOOTH plastic goes on the gold screw!  Ah-hah!

Armed with this tidbit of information, it was mere child’s play to cut the copper wires down to 3/4 inch lengths (remember, I was already a pro at cutting, having done it several times inadvertently), curl the proper wires around the proper screw, tighten the screws, and put the plug back together!

The exhileration of success rushed to my head! I carried my repaired fan outside and showed it off to my bemused husband.

Then I enlisted his 6 foot 2 inches of help.

In short order, with the help of DH and some baling wire (great stuff! free with every bale of hay we buy!) the repaired fan was installed in the big loafing shed to provide more breeze to the sheep and goats (and a dog or two) that routinely hang out in there.

Mission accomplished! I hope they appreciate it!

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