Shortly after we bought our house some number of years ago, I installed a programmable light timer switch in the garage to turn on and off a couple of lights on the front of our house. The trickiest parts of this project were that (1) our wiring is fairly old and doesn’t follow the convenient color-coding of modern electrical installations and (2) the lights are on a 3-way circuit (i.e., there are 2 switches). The latter issue greatly reduced the number of compatible switches since most programmable timers reasonably assume they will be the only switch on the circuit. So, the Intermatic model at left was one of the few programmable timers that I could find that was also 3-way compatible. Oh, how I would come to loath and despise that switch….

The timer seemed to work OK initially, but it’s performance soon degraded. Under normal operation, whenever it would turn on or off, you could hear a gear turning and switch being thrown. Frequently, the mechanical switch inside would just stop working. This usually coincided with “LoBat” warnings on the display. The odd thing is that the battery is supposedly only used to backup the program in the event of a power outage. And subsequent replacement of the battery rarely resolved the situation. I’m more than a little embarrassed to admit that I eventually just took to hitting the switch with the end of a large screwdriver, a small hammer, or just a big rock! And somehow I’d get it working again.

For the better part of a couple years I did battle with that stupid switch. It never failed to, um, fail while we were on vacation for a week or visiting family over a long weekend. We’d return home midday and both our outside lights would be on because the switch had seized up and couldn’t turn them off. Then, from the garage you’d hear, “Where’s that rock?” followed by bang! Bang! BANG!

At some level, I now understand how people get into dysfunctional relationships and are unable to escape them.

Well, I am happy to report that a couple weeks ago, I finally “escaped.” I started by making a call to a local electrical supplier and presented them with my situation. Lo and behold, they too had experienced several problems with the same timer switch, and they subsequently recommended an updated model to replace it. I picked one up along with the necessary faceplate for an indoor installation.

After a couple weeks of flawless operation, today I decided it was time to celebrate with a ceremonial “smashing of the switch.”

What can I say? It felt really good to finally let that switch have it!

This entry was posted by Steve on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 5:44 pm and is filed under House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.