DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD

Bad Electricians

The original remit here was to move some sockets around a kitchen that was being renovated by the homeowner. It was soon apparent that moving things around wasn’t the answer. The changes to the circuits would require a new circuit of it’s own and also require RCD protection. When we arrived to remove the existing wiring from the kitchen we were surprised when the cables ran down the wall to what was once the base of a fireplace. The cables then ran along the top of the base. They had been screeded with a few millimeters of concrete, had no mechanical protection and had a heavy cooker sat on top of them! It got worse to!

We weren’t that surprised when we found more of the same in a group of cables that ran to lights and sockets buried under the same concrete screed.  The original house ring had been previously altered to add more kitchen sockets and a boiler spur.  Unfortunately the person carrying out the work didn’t have a clue about electrics.

We found what can only be described as a figure eight of wiring where the original ring main ran into the modified sockets, ran back to some old sockets which were then run to some new sockets which then ran back to what was probably the other side of the original ring main. When we traced the missing end of the ring main back from the consumer unit we found it running up int a wall space which no longer contained a socket. The cable was still live, left in the plastered wall and forgotten about!

The ring main should have looked like this:

We removed the cluster of unsafe cables  from the concrete, cut out the unsafe taped junctions and re-routed those required into safe zones with proper junction boxes. Now that we had both ends of the house ring we bypassed the kitchen and then we finally started installing the new kitchen ring. Once the new kitchen ring and cooker cables were in place we will disappear until the walls are skimmed.

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