DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD
Bad ‘Electricians’
Regulations broken: BS7671:2008 Reg. 421.7, 526.5, 530.4.2, 411.3.3, 522.8.4, 522.6.1, 522.2.1, 528.3.1, 522.6.5, 134.1.1, 526.3, 526.8.1, 411.3.1.1, 514.4.2, 559.10.5.2

While installing a wet-room in this property we needed to move all electrical junctions from beneath the bathroom floor before we put down our new plywood floor. We found three junction boxes in a row and after a lot of tracing found that they all eventually fed back into the downstairs light circuits via PVC cables pushed through old metal conduit. Unfortunately however not all of the cables were being used for lights!

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We traced two of the cables through the outside wall and into a non-waterproof metal junction box which was no longer fastened to the wall. We couldn’t help notice that the PVC cables were dried out and cracked. One cable which apparently ran to nowhere had been cut off at some point but left connected inside to live!! When we moved the metal box water dripped out and when we opened it we saw badly corroded connectors. What was surprising was that another cable ran to the shed which was further connected to a fluorescent light fixture, fridge, freezer and workbench. All of this was running from a 5amp fuse in the house. When I asked the home owner if the fuse ever blew she said ‘yes, it blows all the time.’ So the good news is that the fuse was doing it’s job.  The bad news was that we couldn’t just disconnect the shed so as to get on with our structural work as the freezer was full of food.

We carried out the work we came to do which was to relocate all junction boxes from the bathroom area to the hallway just outside. We also ran a temporary circuit the garage via a new 2.5mm T&E cable which keeps the freezer running for now. We will be back after the wet room to install a permanent circuit to the shed with a new consumer unit.

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