lettruthout

Not the answer you’re looking for but we just put a cap over our double chimney. Our area has terrible pollution problems and, although we liked having fires, we’re happier not contributing to the area’s bad air.

I see mounting to a stud as something useful if the outlet is expected to get a lot of use. The “wings” of old work box might possibly dig into the drywall and become loose. In this case the use level will be low, right? Besides, attaching to a stud is work intensive, and I believe that using an old work box like this is up to code. I’ve used them a number of times.

EDIT: Also about the caps… I try to observe a “code plus” approach and wrap caps with friction tape (NOT the plastic electrician’s tape). That stuff will provide a little more protection for decades.

Great! I’d also explore properly attaching the blue box to the drywall, then using a box extender to cover the space taken up by the melamine. This way the outlet and cover can be securely attached.

So the the third photo is with the melamine cabinet removed? If so, you are so lucky to have found it now. That old outlet looks like it was shorting. Major fire hazard there. What does the back of the cabinet look like?

The old outlet should never have been buried like that. I’m not an electrician but my understanding is that the outlet should have been removed, the wires properly terminated (with caps or the like), the box covered with a plate cover, then the back of the cabinet should have had a hole cut into it so access to the cover was still possible with the cabinet in place.

Plus: what’s the deal with the blue box? Was it never properly attached to the wall? Did the original installer mis-cut the cabinet hole and instead improperly add a new box?

I moved from DO after my IP address landed on a spam list. At the time DO specifically discouraged installation of mail servers on their machines. Since then I‘ve been running my Mail in a Box server on a Vultr instance with good results.

Will second this idea. I’ve had good luck running low-use Samba servers on a Lenovo tiny model.

Thanks for the feedback on Caddy. 'Will consider that for my next project.

Thanks for mentioning Caddy. 'Will consider that for my next project.

I’ve been using it for a few years (on a mail server and some websites) and am really happy. It’s worth looking into.