CHALLENGE

You know those sinks in public restrooms that have a spigot and no faucets?The ones where you wave your hands around like a raccoon and the water comes on for 5 seconds?Yeah,those sinks.The sinks at the job I'm on are those,and I am now intimately acquainted on how they are suppose to work and why they frequently don't.
It's a low voltage system with a sensor in the spigot that reads your hands and sends a signal to a valve that opens and lets the water through.120 volts of energy come into a junction box and tie into a voltage transformer that converts it to 24 volts.If the transition occurs close to the sinks no problem,but just like any source of electricity,with distance you experience voltage drop.The farther away it is the more the drop,and while 200 feet is not so much an issue for 120 volts,24 volts is another story,which explains the waving around of hands for an inordinate amount of time before you can wash those germs away.It's less efficient.
Now that I've bored the hell out of you with that,lets talk about the installation.Each sink has an individual unit(already in place courtesy of the plumber) and let me tell you,plumbers are not electricians.We come in and drill a hole in the wall behind the unit and fish the wire provided up above the ceiling,mount the transformer in a box and hook up the power.Every unit was in a slightly different location under the sink,and the obstacles behind the wall were unseen and formidable.Insulation,studs,pipes,plywood supports.Our challenge is to push a fish tape through our little hole near the floor up the inside of the wall to a point where it comes out above the ceiling.With that done,we tie a string called jet line to the fish tape and pull it back down to the hole under the sink.The low voltage wires are then tied to the string and pulled back up to above the ceiling.
We did two bathrooms today,12 sinks total-6 went fairly easy,5 went really easy,and one we fought with from 9:30am to 2:00pm.
There were minor cuts and punctures,fiberglas insulation taunted us,there was up and down the ladder relays,much cussing and the fish tape got stuck in the wall,eventually leading to us cutting it off and starting over,but we prevailed.
And at the end of the day,we were tired and over it-but we felt like gods.