Cav's Place

Started Good Omens Sunday and if I’ll manage to read some 30 more pages this evening, after posting this, I should just be able to finish it tomorrow, though I’m not sure I’ll manage to post the quick review then too. So I should get this post over with as fast as I can and get back to it, and I actually hope it really will be a relatively short one this time, since I didn’t exactly do much else over the past few days, so there’s just the part about the new light fixture to write about. Didn’t even run so far this week and, while it’s still possible that I’ll try to run on Friday, I may actually take a break, and not only this week but the next one as well, when the forecast really doesn’t seem to offer many options.

Ordered the light fixture I had my eyes on last Tuesday evening. There would have been others that I’m sure would have been better choices, and I’m not even referring to anything significantly more expensive than the sale price of this one, but this was the one I had stopped at when I started looking, a few months ago, and the last thing I had money set aside for, so when I saw it on sale again, actually for just a little bit less than the price I had seen it at the first time, I decided to go ahead and order it before working myself into a panic again over having to decide and spend money. And did that despite the fact that I had to order it from the same chain I had ordered the first Kone AIMO from, and knowing the problems I was likely to have.
It was delivered on Friday, and at first I thought it was quite nice that I first got a call asking whether I’ll be at home to receive it some two hours later, with the caller saying he’ll call again when he’ll be on his way to my place. I even considered rushing out to buy the few things mentioned in the previous post before the delivery, to know I’ll have nothing to do later, but it’s a good thing I decided not to do that. Not such a good thing that I decided to not even tell dad to turn the intercom on right away when I talked to him a bit later though, and an even worse one that I decided to go to the toilet after said talk.
As I’m sure you already guessed, the doorbell rang as I was sitting on the toilet, about an hour, if not slightly less than that, after that call, and without any second call attempted since. Since the intercom was off, I guess somebody else opened the building’s door for the delivery man, so we got no warning that he was about to come but he could get in. Not that I thought it could be him when dad knocked on the bathroom door to tell me that the doorbell was ringing, and even said that I didn’t think it was for me, which was of course proven wrong when he opened the door and saw that it was indeed for me, resulting in him calling me over and me considering myself fortunate that I hadn’t actually started doing my business there and therefore didn’t need to wipe properly, so could get up, quickly wash my hands and go meet the guy.
First thing I said was that I had been told it’ll be about two hours, but the guy replied that I had talked to his driver, not to him. No idea how I was supposed to have known that, nor why it should have mattered, since I assume the driver knows and, well, drives the route, so his schedule should be the schedule of deliveries. But at least he waited while I quickly checked the contents of the package, after I told him I wanted to see that everything was in one piece, seeing as some parts are fragile. He even broke his pen while rushing to help me cut through the tape, though dad had given me a knife for that purpose. And then he not only made no gesture towards the money, which I had placed next to him from the beginning and which dad had pointed out to him as well, but wrote down the information from my ID card, had me sign for the delivery and handed me the receipt before asking for the money, and sounding quite shy or embarrassed as he did so. He only picked them up when I pointed them out to him again, and only took the bills, counting them carefully but leaving the 0.10 RON coin where it was, then even saying he didn’t want it when I tried to hand it to him.
Since I mentioned being handed the receipt, that was the only thing I was handed. So if, in case of the mouse, I had received the invoice, a copy of the delivery document and the receipt, now I saw no invoice and he didn’t seem to make any copy of the delivery document, just writing my information on and having me sign the one copy he took back with him. There is a document listing the manufacturer’s warranty in the box, and when I read that I also noticed that the manufacturer is a Romanian company, but said document says it must be filled out, which it obviously isn’t, and also lists a mere six months as technical warranty, specifying that the two years of commercial warranty required by law are the responsibility of the store the product was purchased from. But it’s a light fixture and as long as it works the first time, which it does, it should normally be fine… Or so I hope.

Since I needed dad to handle the wiring, taking the fixture I had down and replacing it with this one, at first I just put everything away and then gave him the box with the parts the next day, while I just took off some parts from the old one and washed them. The problem was that there were no instructions in the box, the only thing dad had to go on when trying to put the new fixture together being a pretty faint sketch that only displayed a few of the things you had to do, and even showed a way to connect the wires that required parts that were not provided. So he struggled with it for quite a while, working some things out but being confused by others, some of which I managed to work out when I had a look as well, others being left for later. Some of his wrong assumptions had been based on what he knew was the system used to hang my fixture from the ceiling, so the fact that I didn’t know about it allowed me to work out how certain parts were actually supposed to be put together, and he was quite stuck on a couple of parts that neither of us could find any use for, insisting to find where they were supposed to go until, with some difficulty, I managed to persuade him to just ignore them, put together what he could and leave the rest for when we’ll take the old one down, which was going to happen another day, since he had some other things to do first and then it got dark, which does tend to be a problem when you can’t turn the light on.

That other day turned out to be Monday. It might not have happened even then, but I told him that I wanted to at least check that it worked, as it’s the second working day after delivery and therefore if it’s broken I’ll need to return it then, can’t wait any longer. That didn’t mean actually putting it in its proper place, but just connecting the wires to something, which ended up being a cable he could just plug in, and testing that it turned on, but then he got to work on getting it all over with, even if he was taking breaks to do other things and ended up being at it for probably some three hours, after probably some two more on Saturday. Adding the hour or so I spent adding the glass parts after he was done makes for some six hours spent on it…
Either way, when he removed the old one, we were rather puzzled by the three wires we saw coming down from the ceiling, as he couldn’t remember how it should be connected either, but eventually he tested them and worked it out… Which led to what he seemed convinced was another problem, namely how to connect the new fixture that way, since it just came with two wires. But since those wires were long, that was simply a matter of cutting them in half and connecting two separately, one connected to a single one on the other end and the other to the other two, and the other two to the third one coming from the ceiling, with the other end connected to the three remaining wires. He did have to make those lower connections twice though, because we both forgot to fix the arms in place first, and the attempt to do that with the whole thing up there just resulted in one of the connections coming apart, which obviously meant the others had to be taken apart and redone as well, to be safe.
In between, there was the matter of how to hang it from the ceiling, since the new fixture is made to be screwed on to the ceiling directly while the old one was pretty much hanging from a hook, as there are no screws. He had an idea, which might have worked to some extent, but I just took away the part from the old fixture that was actually hanging from that hook and found that the new one fit through it, so we could actually use the hook system, albeit at the cost of leaving the old fixture without a way to be hooked up somewhere else. Then again, it actually won’t be that fixture that’ll be left without the hook, because it will replace the otherwise identical fixture in the other bedroom, since it seems that the cables going through one of the arms of that one broke at some point, and that one, which we won’t need here anymore, will be left without the hook instead. But to return to the ideas about hanging the new one up, I’d have preferred to use both mine and his, as that was likely to make it move around less, but he said, multiple times, he didn’t want to do that and then, when I asked why, that he just didn’t like how it made it look, which leads me to believe he didn’t quite understand what I was saying. But it works this way too, so it’s good enough for now.

So I now have a new light fixture and can also use the LED lights bought back in December in my room as well. I’m not entirely happy with how efficient the fixture is, referring to the fact that it seems to reduce the amount of light given by the bulbs to some extent, but 10W LEDs are clearly more powerful than the 10.5W CFLs I had before, or more exactly one of these is more powerful than one of those, since I only very rarely turn more than one on. And other than that I quite like how it looks, while the old one always bothered me. Not quite sure that all arms are level though, the one holding the light bulb I usually turn on seeming to hang just slightly lower. But I may be wrong about that.
On the other hand, doubt I’m wrong when I think that the arms are likely to slip a bit over time anyway, under the weight of the glass and the light bulbs, since they go in horizontally and are just fixed in place by screwing a nut tightly on the other side, which definitely is a bad design choice that’s very likely to require getting up there, aligning the arms properly and screwing those nuts tightly again at some point. Considering how it went the first time, that will require disconnecting one end of the wires and connecting them again as well, and if we were to do that again now, I’d also ask dad to switch those connections, since we didn’t check the first time and now the light switch works the other way around, so at first I was turning the two light bulbs on instead of the one. But I’m starting to get used to the change already, so there’s no reason to bother.