DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD
Bad ‘Electricians’
Regulations broken: BS7671:2008: 522.8.4, 522.6.1, 522.8.14

Once upon a time we were invited to repair the central heating in three rooms. In the first room the central heating was too cold. In the second room it was too hot. In the third room we were distracted by this!

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When we pulled up the hatch that had been cut skew-whiff  into the floorboards we immediately saw an unsafe electrical issue. The junction box that was feeding a nearby double socket had a length of phone cable sticking out it. My first reaction was to laugh out loud. We then thought that the phone cable was probably added by some idiot who wanted to use it to tie the box up off of the dirt floor. We were wrong.

After climbing under the floor we discovered that the phone cable went through the party wall brick work and into the property next door! A quick look with the torch showed that nothing was hooked to it so we pulled it back to our side. A little blob of masking tape was covering the end. When I opened the junction box I confirmed that it was indeed hooked up to live and neutral of the house ring main.

The moral of this story is always keep your eyes open for potential trouble when working in the crawl space under a home even if it’s not directly related to your current work.  Had an apprentice or home owner gone underneath it is likely they wouldn’t have noticed the potential for a quick death hanging from above.

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