That job in St. Louis made me realize I was wiring door locks backwards for 6 years

I was on a 12 floor install for a hotel last month and the journeyman watched me hook up a lock. He walked over real slow, looked at the wires, and said 'you got the common and the NO swapped buddy.' I had been doing it that way since my first year because a guy told me 'brown goes to common.' Turns out that was for a different brand. Had to go back and fix 40 doors across 3 other buildings I did that year. Has anyone else got a sticky habit they picked up from a bad teacher?

2 comments

2 Comments

shanelee17d ago

brown goes to common" yeah that's exactly the kind of bad info that sticks with you forever. I had a guy tell me "red is always power" on my first job and I rolled with that for like 3 years before I found out it was completely wrong for half the stuff we were doing. It really sucks cause once you get that muscle memory it's so hard to break. You end up having to double check every single damn wire because your brain just wants to do the wrong thing automatically. Thats why I always tell green guys to read the damn diagrams even if they think they know it. Better to waste 30 seconds verifying than spend a whole day fixing 40 doors like you had to do.

the_joseph17d ago

Expanding on that, the whole color code thing is a mess because different manufacturers use whatever they have lying around. I rewired an old building last month and found brown, blue, and green all swapped depending on what year the panel was built. The real trick is just forgetting colors exist and treating every wire like a suspect until you buzz it out yourself. That muscle memory thing is real though, I still catch myself reaching for the brown wire first even when I know the diagram says black.