DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD
Wave after Wave after Wave of Bad ‘Electricians’
Regulations broken:

One of our clients rang us a couple of weeks ago to do a few minor electrical jobs in a new house he had purchased to rent out. The property is located in Salford, Manchester and a license is required before the new owner can rent the property. In order to get that license one of the items Salford Council requires is a Periodic Inspection Report or PIR. We went over to undertake that inspection and were surprised at just how many faults we found.

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The owner who wasn’t aware that he had issues brought in a decorator before us to paint, lay new carpet throughout and replace the kitchen work surfaces. They also used their ‘electricin’ to install a wall mounted electric heater to the kitchen. It would seem that although they didn’t have a clue as to what they were doing electrically they at least knew better than to try and connect the electric hob to the cooker circuit once they had the work surface replaced . In fact they didn’t know better! They just couldn’t squeeze another copper conductor into the cooker spur as there was no more room. The reason there was no room for the 6mm copper conductor was that there was already two 2.5mm cables and a 1.5mm flexi cable in the way. One of the 2.5mm radial was feeding a double socket further down the wall and the other 2.5 radial was feeding a single spur that was in turn feeding another single spur beside it. They were both located under the basin cabinet. The 1.5mm flexi cable was feeding a kitchen extractor and was not fused down to the required 3amp but was running directly of the 32amp breaker that was feeding the spur. Dangerous!! The cooker spur also had a single socket built into it.

So fortunately for everybody involved we were called in to carry out the PIR as well as look at the hob and cooker issue. When we went in to see what was going on we found all the faults as mentioned above along with more than sixty other issues mostly requiring urgent attention. On the other side of the kitchen the three double sockets were not in fact on a ring circuit as we expected. All three sockets were spured off each other and were in turn being fed from a radial circuit which we traced back to the circuit that the decorator’s mate (the cowboy electrician) had hooked up to and found that it too was a radial which in turn ran back to the rear lounge and that was fed from the front lounge and then the hallway before returning back to the consumer unit where is was fed by a 32amp breaker. That same 32amp breaker also fed another cable which fed the upstairs sockets in yet another radial circuit. YIPES! Ten double circuits on the downstairs radial and four doubles upstairs in a radial arrangement on a 32amp breaker.

The problems got worse from there as we worked through the entire property and the consumer units themselves. In the end there was no way this house was going to pass any type of inspection, unless carried out by a decorator perhaps, so we worked out the cost to repair and make safe.

We’ve been on site here for two days and started by adding the missing main protective bonding conductor from the water installation pipe, removed both old consumer units which were cracked and broken and started from scratch. Once we added the new consumer units we worked through each circuit first visually inspecting each connection (i.e. light switches, single and double sockets, light fixtures, switched spurs) and then after making remedial repairs to make sure that everything conforms to today’s standards we tested all circuits (dead testing) to confirm they were safe before connecting them up and live testing. We also removed all traces of the radial circuit from the kitchen and added an RCD protected ring to feed the newly placed doubles throughout the room and the fan assisted cooker. The hob was connected to the original spur after it was cleaned up and tested.  The old under protected radials feeding upstairs and downstairs were tested, separated by floor and each was fed by an RCD protected breaker of 20amp to ensure safe operation.

This property has no gas service and all heating is provided via electric storage heaters on an Economy 7 service. The owner also wanted to add one more heater to the system but there were no spare ways available. The immersion heater located in the loft was also running on the low tariff at night and had a boost for daytime. We sorted out the boost circuit when we were working on the other consumer unit. The overnight immersion heater however was fused directly to a 40amp breaker with no isolator! We have since added the required isolator and dropped the fuse to a more reasonable 20amp rating. We have also had to make remedial repairs to most of the storage heater spurs. Some of the surface mount boxes had the flexi cables routed through the top of the box and the flexi cables had not been installed correctly.

I hear people putting down the councils all the time regarding these licenses and inspections and I’ve even had a moan too but without this inspection the property was unsafe and no one would have know better. Is this the kind of property  you want one of your relatives to live in? Perhaps your daughter who is renting while in University? I think not!  So you can say what you want about Salford Council requiring licenses in order to let out your property but in this case it has saved a potential disaster. It would seem that the ‘decorator electrican’ or ‘decortrician’ did not check the circuits before during or after the heater was installed. If he had the test equipment and knew how to use it he would have seen something wrong as soon as he tried to confirm continuity on the suspected ring main. Alarm bells would have rung in his head and he would have investigated like we did. There were many signs of shoddy work before the decortrician showed up too. Perhaps the joiner even had a go!

The house is now electrically safe with the proper accessories in the appropriate area. It cost the home owner more than he originally planned but as he said ‘there will be no issues here for years to come and he and I will both sleep better at night.’  It’s true! It’s true!

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