Licensed and Dangerous
I took a big step towards getting the basement project rolling: I passed the Denver Homeowner’s Exam for Electrical and Plumbing, which means I can now pull my own Electrical and Plumbing permits for my own house. The tests were a bit different than I expected. Well, honestly, I’m not sure what I expected. There were the predictable questions about how many linear feet between outlets on a wall, and the maximum length between a box and the first staple, but there were quite a few questions dealing with wiring the circuit breaker panel. I had no idea what to expect on plumbing, as I have very little experience with it, but the answers were not too hard to find. Electrical was 30 multiple-choice questions and plumbing was 20.
The Contractor’s Licensing office provides you with a copy of International Residential Code 2003, which is much more readable than the NEC code book. The ICC book actually seems like it might be worth having as a reference, though it’s not exactly user-friendly. As one Amazon commenter said, “There was almost no character development and the plotlines were dated”, yet it’s for the most part not too difficult to ferret out the answers. You’re also allowed to bring a “helper”, in this case, my father-in-law, though really this just had the effect of parallelizing the effort – while he’s experienced at doing electrical and plumbing work, many of the questions were really things that you had to look up anyway.
Now all I need is to finish my plans and I can pull permits and start making some dust.
— Gordon Weakliem
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.