DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD

Bad Electrical

The lazy approach of running electrical cables around a doorway opening and then nailing up some architrave  to hide it still haunts us today.  It was used as a way of getting a cable from one floor or to another or to add a light switch without having to chase out the entire wall rom top to bottom. What happens however when that doorway is removed? What happens is that the once hidden cable now runs up the wall with no protection form having a  nail or screw put through it. The lack of properly laid out cable from years ago comes back to haunt again.

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We arrived on this job after builders had removed a wall section to create a thru wall connection between a lounge and a kitchen. They also bricked up the old doorway (without removing the wooden door jamb!) which was the main entrance to the lounge. With the architrave removed it’s now easy to see the group of cables that ran from under the house and up to the next floor. On the right side of the door another pair of cables which run half way down the door jamb , turn right and go ‘somehere” into the plaster.

So the builders have changed the structure of this house. Left the electrics as they found them and had we not been called by the homeowner the cables would now be plastered over leaving them running skewiff and out of the permitted cable routes that are there to keep everybody safe.

So the problem becomes how do you make these cables safe when they are no longer hidden behind the architrave and they don’t fit today’s standards. See this NICEIC Pocket Guide to Permitted Cable Routes to see where cables are allowed to run. In the case of our disappearing doorway we now have cables which are no longer hidden and outside of the  permitted cable routes. And as far as I can tell, the use of a doorway to run a cable was never ‘permitted’ although I would appreciate hearing from anyone who can quote a regulation that says otherwise.

As none of these cables are sunk 50mm deep into the wall, the consumer unit is an old Wylex box with wire fuses and no RCD the problem of making this situation safe will require a bit of effort. First we’ll move the double socket up to 450mm from the floor and move the light switch down to sit 1200mm above the floor height. We’ll shift them over so that the cables are lined up with the boxes thus placing them within a permitted cable route. The cables running to the left side of the doorway where our cables don’t run into any box and therefore are all running outside of a permitted route are a bit more of a challenge. We will have to trace these cables to where they go and then either find a permitted zone for them to run through or mechanically protect the cables with an earthed metal cover thick enough not to be easily penetrated by a screw, nail or the like. Please note that the earthed metal cover should not to be mistaken for light weight metal cable capping.

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