Circuit 09 · A note from Wes
Thirty-five years in other people's houses
I spent 35 years as a locksmith and a handyman. That's a lot of front doors, a lot of basements, a lot of furnaces that quit on the coldest night of the year. You learn what a house does when the power goes. You learn it from the people standing in their kitchens in their coats.
Some of the worst calls came after. When a house burns, somebody has to secure what's left of it. Every space heater fire I ever walked through afterward started with something sitting too close to it. That's why the safety rules in this book sit right next to every heater, not in a chapter at the back.
In 1997 I was in Lewistown, Montana, rekeying a man's shop, and what kept that shop warm is in this book. In 2019 I changed Inga's locks when she sold her place, and she handed me ten bricks in a milk crate. I've built that heater on them every winter since.
I've cracked open the expensive power boxes to see what's inside, and I've built the cheap, ugly ones on my own kitchen table. The cheap ones work, if they're sized right and fused right. That's the part nobody puts in a video.
So I wrote it all down. Not for the fellow with a $5,000 generator in the side yard. For the widow up the mountain road, the couple on a fixed income, the man with a CPAP on the nightstand. I'm no electrician and I won't pretend to be. I'm the handyman who's been in the house.
“Nothing about a blackout is free. But most of it is cheap, if somebody shows you the parts.”
Wes Tucker
