Wiring a Tanning Bed for Dummies

Home tanning bed

A favorite trick of the self-appointed freelancers at eHow, the Demand Media website, was to search the available topics for keywords related to their supposed areas of expertise. The website's rather strange architecture sometimes placed how-to articles in unusual places, which is probably how the question of "Instructions for Wiring a Tanning Bed"¹ ended up in Wellness instead of somewhere a person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of electrical work could attempt to answer it (perhaps worse, it's now at Leaf.tv). Money being money, however, Krista Raye fired up that BA in English of hers and jumped right in. She shouldn't have...

Raye, nonetheless, took on this challenge, informing her readers that it is the tanning bed buyer's responsibility to,

"Decide if your home possesses an electrical outlet necessary for running a tanning bed. For example, if the tanning bed runs on 120 volts, then it will most likely work in an average outlet. If you own a larger tanning bed, it will need 220 volts to work properly, and you should contact an electrician to have an outlet installed."

Well, of course... although we probably wouldn't use the action verb "decide" in this case; we'd be more likely to say "determine" (like her source material does). Krista, while carefully rewording an article about "Power Requirements for Tanning Beds" to avoid plagiarism, clearly didn't understand most of its instructions. She tells people to "Designate an entire outlet solely for your tanning bed, and do not plug anything else in it. If you overload the outlet, then you may throw a circuit breaker..." ...where the original says that manufacturers require a dedicated circuit, which we respectfully submit is not the same thing as "do not plug anything else in" the outlet. Heck that's not even the same thing as "do not plug anything else into the same circuit"! Idiot.

Raye concludes by rewording the section about power conditioning (maintaining correct voltage), which is one reason why manufacturers advise a dedicated circuit. Oh, and what: 15- or 20-amp circuitry? Of course, since she has no idea what that stuff's all about, Krista simply says,

"Install a buck-booster to your tanning bed. This will lower or raise the voltage in the tanning bed."

Ummm, yeah: why would I want to do that, Krista? Oh, yeah: you don't know, do you...

This is a classic case of the blind leading the blind, and we think placing some unprepared halfwit in the middle of the transaction. When we see that, we think it's a good idea to award writers like Raye the Antisocial Network's Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7323315_instructions-wiring-tanning-bed.html

copyright © 2017-2022 scmrak

DD - ELECTRICAL