DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD
Bad ‘Electricians’
Regulations broken: BS7671:2008 Reg 526.6, 530.4.1; 421.7, 526.5; 416.2.1; 514.1.2; 514.14.1

How many safety issues can you count here? Whatever the count is there are more issues here than we photographed. What you can see here is the (connector strips or chocolate block) that is uncovered and LIVE! This area under the homeowners stairs is where the children store their toys and bike helmets! But wait! There’s more.

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The home owners wanted to remove the old tongue and groove wall that was covering in the area under the stairs. The problem was that over the years, about fifty years, old power cables and subsequent new power cables had been clipped direct to that same wall and the timber frame holding up the wall. Our job was to trace each wire and then re-route them to the back wall where they could be hidden behind a dry lined wall we will be putting up next week.

What we found was a series of wiring issues ranging from underrated connector strips, uncovered (as pictured) connector strips, a few nails that had been driven into floorboards and through the cables beneath them, and two live cables with nothing but a wrap of white tape keeping the children safe.

All in a days work for us. We traced each cable and clipped them off upstairs and then drilled out proper routes for the cables to run away from the flooring nails. We also extended a few other cables we located so that the cables ran in one piece from the source at the consumer unit to the destination. Much better than having several lengths of cables being spliced together with a dozen connector blocks. And finally we clipped back those two live cables we found hanging out of the ceiling under the stairs and fixed a secure covered connector.

And the last items we found while sorting out the cables in the consumer unit was an unhooked neutral connector to the house ring main! We sorted that out too. Has anyone noticed that this property has two main fuses before the meter? That’s because one of the fuses is feeding the neighbours property through a conduit in the wall. We checked that property too and sure enough the feed comes through the wall runs into another main fuse and then to the his meter.

Next week we’ll build a proper cover over the consumer unit and dry line the back wall ready for skimming.

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