By the time I had my second cup of coffee, I had received reports of two household fatalities. My wife told me the doorbell was dead and my son told me a goldfish was missing.
I dealt with the doorbell first. I thought my chances of reviving it were much greater than resurrecting Rudolph, the missing goldfish.
The doorbell is temperamental. There are certain days, usually rainy days, when it doesn't want to work.
I was worried about the spotty performance of the bell. So I took a step beyond my usual remedy of tightening any visible screws. I ventured into the realm of doorbell theory.
After plowing through the doorbell sections in two books, "The Way Things Work" by David Macaulay, and "The New York Times Season-by-Season Guide to Home Maintenance" by John Warde, I came up with the following understanding of what goes on.
When you press the doorbell button it sends electricity from a transformer along wires to the bell. The juice collaborates with a magnet and spring to excite a hammer to strike a bell. Or as Peter, Paul and Mary might sing: If you have a hammer, and if you have a bell, and if you've got a juiced up electromagnet, then you've got a working doorbell. All over this land.
The Warde book also told me how to test the inner workings of my doorbell. This sounded risky. To me, checking the inner workings of a household device is like going to the doctor for tests. You can't be sure what the examination will turn up.
But I felt lucky, so I pushed ahead. I checked the current, or the flow of the juice in the doorbell, by carefully removing the button from the front door frame, leaving the doorbell wires attached to the terminals in the button. Using my circuit tester, a device that looks like a tiny two-legged jellyfish with a bulb for a head, I connected the "legs" to terminals in the doorbell button.
The light in the head of the jellyfish did not go on. This was good. The dark bulb meant that the transformer was doing its job of taking high-powered household electricity and toning it down to the mild-mannered juice that doorbells prefer, juice too weak to light the bulb.
If the circuit tester light had gone on, it would have meant I had too much juice in the doorbell. It would have been a sign that I had a faulty transformer. And a transformer gone bad, the book said, was a fire hazard.
