mylocalelectrician’s posterous

We are back on the rewire we started last week. We hope to finish off this Friday. We put in the new cooker circuit today, finished off the first fix of the downstairs lighting circuit, Tidied up the cables a brought them all to where the consumer unit is going to be installed and had a really good tidy up around the whole property ready for our second fix and screwed back all the floor boards we had lifted up.

While we were deciding where to run the new cooker circuit we had a look at where the old rubber cable was running. We found it coming from the old fuse board, under the kitchen floor and up the wall behind the cooker. But as you have probably seen from time to time someone had extended it up into the cupboard above the cooker. On further inspection of the old circuit the cables in the cooker switch were all PVC.

Of course to run in our new circuit we needed to pull the old tiles off the wall so we could chase the wall. Well take a look at the picture I took as we took away the first tile. Not only had someone connected the rubber cable behind the tiles in a junction box but there was no cover on it !! And another point I wish to make is that they had also packed the space between the junction box and the tile with newspaper.         

We have pulled off our rewire for Thursday and Friday this week as we had already booked another job in 4 weeks ago. We did actually forget about this job until Tuesday when I looked in the diary!!

This job is a nice two day job. It basically is moving a few lighting circuits, put in a new two way circuit, 2 radial circuits, one for a new combi boiler and another for a power shower and a new consumer unit.

The first job Larry did while I was sorting out the lighting circuits was to fit the new consumer unit. This was a nice easy job as the tails and earth’s were all up to date and surprisingly all the original circuits in the property were long enough for the new consumer unit !! When Larry had completed the new board the only circuit that did not hold on the RCD was the kitchen ring.

Well !!! Take a look at the picture. Like the old saying says pictures tell a thousand stories. We found this behind a wall unit that was installed by a builder / kitchen fitter only two years ago. What amazes me is that when we pointed this out to the customer he said “ It all makes sense now ‘cos before the kitchen was fitted the socket worked “. The socket the customer was referring to was just underneath this bodge up. Also bear in mind that the connectors that were used here are 10amp lighting flex connectors on a 32 amp ring main. Also in the back of the socket the earth cable was touching the neutral and the live cable was out of the live terminal of the socket and the copper part of the live had snapped off in the terminal of the socket. I don’t think I have ever seen such a badly wired socket and hope that I never again.        

I’ve first fixed the upstairs ring today including the coax cables. I really don’t know how I did it all in one day to as there are four bedrooms, and all four bedrooms had the coax cables too. Although to be honest I am really tired this evening, Gonna have an early night I think.

The picture I took today, and yes I even got time to take a picture for my blog, was under the floor in the second bedroom. It is quite clear that there is or were mice in the property as you can see in the picture there is quite a large amount of mice droppings between the rafters.

I did not see any, but I guess all the banging about we were making they made it off on their feet. I have also told the customer to be aware as the mice could cause major problem’s in the future if they decide to start eating our new cables but there is nothing I can do about this other than conduit all our cables which of course nobody would pay for in a domestic dwelling.

I really do hope that the customer has taken on board what I have explained and do something about his mice problem.

I don’t know if all electricians get involved in domestic security alarm systems but we find that on top of all our electrical works, Alarm systems are also a good source of income.

We went to a callout yesterday on an alarm system that my work partner Larry had fitted in 2001.  The customer rang us up saying that they had just had a new double glazed front door fitted and the fitters have disconnected the door contact from the old front door and ( Of course ) the alarm went off !!

Larry explained over the phone how to disable the alarm from sounding until we could get there.

When we got there we explained to the customer that the alarm panel went into tamper and we refitted the door contact to the new door. While we were there we also serviced the alarm, As the customer asked us to, and all was in good working order. The only thing needing replacement was the 3.0Ah battery as this was no longer holding a charge. But as alarm batteries should be changed around the 5 year mark, A 9 year old battery didn’t really owe the customer anything !!     

We have been to test a property today as the customers had just bought the house and wanted a periodic inspection report done for their own piece of mind. They told us that apparently the property had been rewired a ‘ few years back ‘ !! Do people really think us electricians are stupid ?

As you can all see the consumer unit is quite clearly a 17^th edition board ( Dual rcd’s ) and has been done very recently. Before we started the test we did explain to the customer that of course we can do a periodic report on the property but she should really have a certificate for these works that were recently done.

Of course because the people have only just moved in they do not know who had done the work !!