... at home. The previous owner could be called a bit of a dabbler, thankfully he wasn't called an ambulance (or the fire brigade...). Half of the cabling was not rated for anything, ran wildly all over the place, and the whole thing was a complete and utter mess.

Yeah, a goldmine for the certified electrician. (I could do most of it, but I'm not allowed, so I rather don't, "manslaughter charges" and "gross and wilful neglect", or whatever they are called, are terms I do not want to encounter).

I am in the same boat. Fully qualified electrical and electronics engineer but at the end of the day I've used none of it for decades so I am not able to certify any work I would perform.

So that being said, unless it's minor, I prefer to not invalidate my insurance by having a go. Mind you, I am also of an age where crawling around loft spaces etc is less than appealing anyway so I tend to avoid that as well out of simple choice.

There's an age where crawling around loft spaces etc is appealing?

Not really, in my experience, but there becomes a point at which you can delegate.

In the office, I typically can find a more junior member of staff to do it, at home I go for the Victorian approach and send a child!

Approximately from 7 to 10 years of age.

Ah. A retired five-year-old advisor for the Evil Overlord, I presume? The child is still alive, which is a good credential for the job.

AC ..... just cos ....

I have sent a borrowed 8 year old into the false ceiling to get into an office that somebody managed to deadlock from the inside.

To be fair the kid was a junior state gymnastic champ who could lift himself into the ceiling with one finger

Same here in the 'industry' for waaaay too many years, but qualifications stopped at 16th.

AND, the A-hole that previously lived here somehow managed to connect parts of the upstairs ring with the downstairs.

To make matters worse, a few years ago in the kitchen, I had the kettle on and the washing machine doing a boil-wash. I caught that unmistakable whiff of burning insulation. Looking around, I noticed smoke fuming from behind one of the kitchen cabinets.

Behind the cabinet I found a huge mess of smoking filler. Turned off power and inspected. This utter wanker had extended the downstairs ring by using a bit of 6A chocblock!! FFS!

I later found a similar fuckup on the other side of the kitchen where he had grafted in the cooker hood DIRECTLY into to the electric oven feed.

Oh, and let's not forget the screw he had driven through the cold water feed to the tank in the loft (while fitting the pan shelves). He also stole all the *included* light fittings and bodged the wiring for the kitchen light so that when it was turned on, it caught fire.

The final insult (so far...) was that he left the address owing over £24k and saddled this address with a 'debt warning' that took at least five years to clear. Bailiffs are not fun.

F***ing C**t.

Years ago in my house I realised with the obligatory shock that an electrician long ago had used the "1 wire too few" approach to wiring the top and bottom stair light switches so that switching off either the downstairs or upstairs lighting circuits at the fuse box meant they were both still live.

Was this 'obligatory shock' literal or figurative? Or potentially both?

Well, that explains where the guy who sold my in-laws their house moved to...

He’d ran out of cable partway through a run, so he’d joined it in much the same way. Except he’d plastered it into the wall, and decided to run the cable diagonally across the room.

As well as using a BT phone socket as a joint when he ran out of cable for the outside lights, and left a load of carpet gripper in the void space where he’d fitted down lighters.

You can relax though, he was much better at other areas of DIY, for example the manhole covers he mastiked in place were really neatly done, as was the patio he built over the one we couldn’t find...

He's so far below (Above? Did he roll-over a 128 bit number?), that even Vogon poetry would be too lenient a punishment...

Icon because when faced with nuclear or fire, go with the nuclear fire.

Although the idjit would probably fizzle the detonation somehow.

Sounds a bit like my gaff.

Was previously an unregistered high occupancy build. Four small adult rooms. Owner cut the immersion heater from the main board and fitted a 13A plug to it to 'stop it being used' and then run a two socket extension from one bedroom to another, having created the gang using a brick splitter (the cube you plugged in to make three sockets.

Then the socket for the washer dryer; run off an extension plug wired into the oven socket....

I have not asked an electrician to installer a new consumer box; don't fancy having the rest of it condemned.l!

Many a decade ago..... A friend of mine, while still in his late teens, rewired the family home pretty much solo. At that time it was just necessary to get it inspected and signed off. When it came to the inspection it was not just signed off but the inspector said it was the best job that he'd seen, and wanted to know which workmen they'd used so he could recommend them in the future. He was slightly 'surprised' to find who had done it.

I'm not so surprised. A professional is just a person who takes money for his/her services and is qualified on paper. The end result is often crap. I hope your friend chose the trade and made fcucktons of money.

Actually IIRC he went on the get 7 'A' O-levels, 5 'A' A-levels, and a First. Then had a very successful career as a well paid boffin! Though he could also have had a career as a Richard Stilgoe impersonator!

Respect! Tell him my kudos, if you two still keep in touch.

Grew up in an ancient old farmhouse. We did some rewiring and at the time got more for the lead cable we pulled out than the new copper cost. Still remember the smell of 300 year old cowshit in the wattle and daub walls when plastering around the new sockets/switches. The whole place was higgledy piggledy and extended out to a garage up against a very large old barn. In the garage about 10' up was a bakerlite box with a big switch on the side. We never looked to closely at it until the barns were turned into houses and in the process it was discovered (by a huge flash and bang from a digger) that this was connected to an old underground mains cable that even the electricity company had forgotten about. We could have cut our bills enormously!

I have an honours in electrical and electrical eng and it always amazes me that I can tell employees to do things I cant legally do myself.

"At that time it was just necessary to get it inspected and signed off."

It still works like that. Anything your side of the consumer unit is fair game, but you MUST have it checked and certified or you won't be able to sell the house or have valid insurance.

It is worth checking the wiring [1]Regs Part P as it was updated in April 2013 with less stringent requirements as to what was notifiable

[2] Some FAQ

[1] https://electrical.theiet.org/bs-7671/building-regulations/part-p-england-and-wales/

[2] https://electrical.theiet.org/bs-7671/building-regulations/part-p-england-and-wales/frequently-asked-questions/

Just in case...

As pointed out in the FAQ linked by [1]John Miles , there is nothing stopping you doing electrical work in your own home, and indeed there are some things that don't need certification if you are doing it for yourself - the obvious things like replacing a light fitting, but also adding a spur to an existing circuit, and this applies particularly where an urgent repair is necessary for safety.

It's also possible to do more extensive work yourself, but you will need at the very least to issue a notice to Building Control, and as they will usually require inspection by an electrician it's usually simpler (in theory) to engage a self-certifying electrician to oversee the work in the first place.

The problem is that by agreeing to do so, such an electrician effectively "owns" the work, for the purposes of professional indemnity and liability insurance and so will want to be absolutely certain you've done the work correctly.

We've recently built a house, and as someone who was self-certifying until I got a "proper" job a few years ago, I was desperate to save money by installing the electrics myself. Our builder had an electrician he worked with, so we asked him about oversight, but the bloke wanted to be on site the whole time I was working and apart from the inflexibility this would entail, he estimated a cost that wasn't far off what he would have charged to do the work himself.

I did eventually find a more flexible electrician, who visited a couple of times while we didn't have ceilings or plaster just to check routes and make suggestions, and then did a full-day take-everything-apart inspection once I'd finished. Much more reasonable.

And of course, we're all following the recommendation to have full installation inspections in our homes every ten years, aren't we....?

M.

[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/11/08/who_me/#c_4363311

A couple of years ago I had to get an electrical safety certificate for a house I rent out. The chap doing the testing found that two double sockets in the main room were very via a length of 0.5mm^2 flex from the cellar lighting circuit. That particular installation had been carried out by a "professional" electrician and later, when I rented the house myself, certified by another one.

Mind you, a friend of mine had an Alfa Spider which passed half a dozen MOT tests at different testing stations with the rear brakes completely inoperable ... the pipe feeding them ended in a blanking plug. Which shows just how reluctant "professional" MOT testers were to do the road test required for cars with limited slip differentials.

A previous employer many moons ago had a 20ft trailer, previously used as a mobile classroom. It had "electric" brakes which came on with the brake lights, but obviously only to a certain set point as otherwise you risked overbraking the trailer, skidding, jackknifing etc.

Getting that thing through the MoT was nigh-on impossible as there wasn't a suitable test profile. Instead we found a friendly garage where the tester was willing to put his foot on the rolling road rollers at the appropriate point in the test.

M.

We've called in the Electrician for our new place (an old 70's house), there are a number of light switches which dont seem to do anything, and in the entrance hall, we have 6 wires sticking out (for one light socket!) but none of them are the standard colours for Earth, positive, and negative. No way am I playing round with that to try and work out what the hell is happening.

The electrician should have some fun trying to sort it all out...

"we have 6 wires sticking out (for one light socket!) but none of them are the standard colours"

Really? That's shocking...

(Watt? Ohm, you're right, sorry, I should really have kept it current.)

That hertz.

We must resist making these puns...

Nah, a good pun always sparks more conversation.

They add impedance to the comment section, which nobody has the capacitance for.

Ohm Mho God.

Safety first etc,

But 6 wires going to a fitting is normal

http://www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk/how-to/light-fitting/light-wiring-diagrams

http://www.lightwiring.co.uk/before-you-start-safety-first/

I hope they are a down to earth type though.

Oh they're completely grounded....

Part of my current property (gedit) was knocked up by a builder and his sons in the 70s. When a switch fails I can guarantee its because the cable to it was cut 1/2" short and over time the tension has pulled the copper lose from under the not tightened down enough screw. When I had the PV put in the fitters noted half the wires in the back of the consumer unit were loose! I did wonder whether some previous occupant just overinsured the place.

> "colours for Earth, positive, and negative"

If you're expecting mains to have those three then it's a good job you're getting a professional in.

Mains is AC. The positive and negative swap 100 times per second (or 120 time in some countries). Good luck updating the wiring quickly enough for that.

Live and Neutral are the terms you're looking for. Live will be brown, red or black, or in some cables/situations it could be grey, blue or yellow. So I'm left wondering what non-standard colour you've encountered.

Or "phase" and neutral as both wires are - technically speaking - "live" and should be treated as such.

In the UK, in a single-phase domestic installation, the "live" in a "twin and earth" cable will only be brown, or red before 2004. Domestically you will sometimes find "three core and earth" between the switches in two-way (or three-way, etc.) lighting installations. Before 2004, 3&E cable is red-yellow-blue. Now it is brown-black-grey.

Confusion arises because before 2004, black was "neutral" and blue was "phase 3" while now, blue is neutral and black is phase 2. Just be thankful that they didn't go with one of the harmonisation proposals, which was to have all "live" cables black, and print "1", "2" and "3" on them, or brown-black-black which was one of the daft compromises considered.

It is for this reason that if you make changes to the wiring in your home and use brown-blue cable in an otherwise red-black installation, you need to fix a [1]warning sticker , usually to the consumer unit.

Heating systems are sometimes wired using many-core flex. Quite a lot of colour or numbering schemes are in use, including all-black.

And to complete the confusion, appliance flex in the UK was red-black-green until 1970 or so, when it changed to brown-blue-green&yellow.

M.

[1] https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Main_Index/Cable_Accessories_Index/Cable_Colour_Labels/index.html

You can probably use inductive logic to figure it out.

I bought a long empty house in the Welsh valleys and arranged for the leccie man to reconnect and the old slot meter, the day we moved in.

No chance, he said after a couple of minutes looking at the old wiring. The old stuff didn't have an earth and was lead sheathed. The newer wiring was mine detonator cabling, nicked off the NCB.

Fortunately he called early in the morning and I was able to purchase the necessary bits and bobs to enable to house to lit and powered by rather a lot of cable sockets, connected to a new fuse board. We lived like that for almost a year, waiting for a council improvement grant to come through.

You’re lucky, one spark and that detonator cable could have gone with a bang...

Joking aside, it would be det cord to be able to go with a bang, and that's non-conductive. It's a tube full of explosive :-) The NCB stuff that was half-inched would just be normal copper wire used to set off a remote electrical detonator.

Just so long as you don't have any of those big long red tube shaped fuses at the end.

Not joking, we had a high voltage power supply to a flash x-ray (what the kids today call an x-ray laser) where the connection from the bunker full of capacitor banks to the head was a glass tube full of copper salt solution wrapped with explosive tape.

It's rather difficult to turn off 10,000A of high voltage DC with your typical 2 pole switch.

Until they moved out, about fifteen years ago, my parents' house still had functioning 15A two-pin sockets, wired up (with gutta-percha insulation) when the house was built in the 30s.

Some friends rented a nice old farmhouse and I'm guessing the owners just put in new cable at random every now and then. Above the lean to kitchen door into the rest of the property there were around 30 cables in a block coming from the consumer unit to a living room, two bathrooms and two bedrooms! I did wonder it it might be structural.

I had the joy of managing a umber of flood wiring projects when the move from thin Ethernet to Cat5 started. The first few projects only put sockets where there were desks as the departments concerned didn't want to pay for 'useless' sockets, needless to say they then restructure, moved offices and sometimes just moved desks around and I ended up paying to have additional individual network points put in. this was expensive as a qualified electrician did all the work rather than testing and inspecting the work of a network technician.

After a couple of those issues I mandated true flood wiring with sockets along every wall no more than 2 metres apart. I got in to work one Monday morning to find out a whole network segment was down sending a comms technician over revealed that the department concerned were having some offices remodeled but had not thought to tell us. They removed a whole wall complete with trunking, network cables, sockets etc and were then surprised that the rest of the network points on the floor died.

We had to make up some patch leads to get them back on the air then pay again to have the destruction remediated properly later. The same department refused to have a small room flood wired as it 'will only ever be used for filing cabinets' then announced at 10 am on the Friday before bank holiday that they had moved an out of hours Child Protection Officer into the office and there was nowhere to plug in his PC. That was resolved with a large drill cutting a hole through the wall big enough to feed an electrical extension through and a long network cable, I suspect its still like that 20 years later.

"That was resolved with a large drill cutting a hole through the wall"

A better resolution would have been to quote the signed off statement that the room would only ever be used for filing cabinets.

Or like here (NHS hospital) - need to move people into this office now! No expense spared to add power and network points.

Six months later - users move out, room never used as an office again .....

I think a lot of waste in the NHS is top-down, largely led by government policy.

Like, for instance, the "Nightingale hospital" where I had to go for my second COVID jab, which was never used as an actual hospital, despite being converted from a conference centre, at massive expense. Largely because there were never any staff to actually operate it.

I'll bet that someone got a cushy contract to do the work though, at the tax-payer's expense.

I was at a customer for a 2 week project. We had been told that there would be building works at the weekend.

We arrived the second week to find there was now a wall with a combination lock, stopping access to the machine room where we were meant to be working.

No one knew the combination, so we pulled up a few floor tiles, and sent a small person under the door to open it. When the "building manager" came round at lunch time to see the work and found the door blocked open there was a "full and frank discussion" about the requirements of the wall - if someone can crawl underneath it why have it.

I have heard of similar situations where the 'solution' was to cross the wall via the false ceiling.

I hope that the person you sent was suitably dressed for H&S?!? ---------->

Centuries in the future, this is going to still be the case. It is called Jeffries Tubes in Star Trek!