DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD

Bad DIY

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This job had a lot going on. We were asked to move a kitchen from one room to another which meant upgrading the consumer unit to comply with current building regulations, the central heating controls also required moving from the old kitchen to a closet and there were lots of plumbing issues too. The worst issues we had to sort out was this set of clamp on lights in the bathroom which were wired through a false ceiling and not at all compliant or safe.

We knew the old lights had to come out but the question was where was the fitting being feed from. This house is not a semi but rather has one family living upstairs and one family downstairs so pulling up the upstairs floors was not an option. We took an educated guess by way of imperfections in the plastering up of the original light fixture and put a test hole through the ceiling. Bingo! We found the old feed on our first attempt. It took a bit longer to figure out exactly what we had found though.

So what is it? Well, it’s an old style three pin extension which has had the protective bezel cut away. That is why the brass earth prong is sticking through. The earth was never continued to the lamps. We still couldn’t figure out how the connection to the clamp lights was made until we fished around in the ceiling a bit longer and found the European plug adapter which had been pushed into the old extension. We removed all of the old wiring and lamps, disconnected the PVC cables and then provided a proper connector. We placed the entire connection inside a choc box and then wired that into an appropriate lamp fixture for a bathroom. The finished product hid the hole we had to create and provides much more light for those early morning baths.

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