DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD
Bad ‘Electricians’
Regulations broken: BS7671:2008 416.2.2, 134.2.1, 610.6, 631.1, 314.4, 132.13, 514.9

We were on this site to re-install an electric shower about a month ago. See original article here. We installed the shower but were unable to sort out the electrics due to a issues we located with the previous consumer unit. While testing circuits we found some errors in the house wiring. To be specific the circuit feeding the sockets had been bodged by a bad kitchen fitting job.

As we mentioned in the previous article this home had apparently been re-wired five years earlier. It hadn’t! Someone calling themselves an electrician added a couple of mini circuit breakers (MCBs) of a different brand type and did some creative wiring. We repaired the bodged cooker circuit and then discovered that the circuit labeled bedroom socket and the supposed ring main were spliced into each other. As we continued testing the ring main we discovered that there was in fact no ring main. We did however find that buried in the kitchen behind the tiles was a cable which connected the upstairs circuit to the downstairs but also created an unwanted spur with four sockets on the end.

In the end we found the unwanted kitchen to upstairs connection and removed the offending cable. We then created two spurs feeding each floor with properly rated circuit breakers. The bedroom socket that was supposedly on it’s own breaker was also added to the new spur. We then installed the new consumer unit using RCBOs for each circuit. The entire system was tested as prescribed and then made live. Once our live readings were recorded we cleaned up and left the property safe.

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