Electrical cable nightmare

[Bayliss]

Changed home insurance company this year and they required a conformity certification from a qualified electrician (thatched roof). As my Son has just qualified as a electrician its a job for him He had a quick look and said you have a rubber cable feed from the box to the lighting circuit, that will have to be upgraded for a start! So he made a start by doing the required testing, which he said 'your house wiring has failed the test' I have some work to do here. Upon further investigation lifting some floor boards upstairs we were both horrified by what we found. Vermin had chewed through the protective cable sheafing to expose wires, how we didn't have a fire we dont know!! Other horrors also quickly emerged resulting in the need for a complete new lighting circuit.
Only eight years ago the house was given a clean bill of electrical health, thats when we purchased the cottage, seems the inspection wasn't up to much as some horrors like rubber cable cracking and perished has not happened in just eight years. By the grace we still have a home.

 

[Penners]

What wonderful news, Bayliss!

That may seem a strange response to your wiring woes, but the wonderful thing is that your son has discovered the horrors before they've become a crisis.

It would be easy to react to the situation by cursing the previous electrical inspector up hill and down dale. But I suspect this may be a situation similar to that of a structural survey - what you can't see you can't inspect. In electrical terms, if the previous inspector checked everything with his magical meter and found it satisfactory, short of ripping up floorboards that's about the best he could do.

But of course I have no idea whether he was neglectful or not.

Your second fortunate situation is that you have a qualified son to put all this right for you. I hope he won't be charging his dear old dad!

Silly final point - he has checked all the wiring in the house, hasn't he? Not just the lighting circuit?

 

[Bayliss]

Indeed Penners, you are right in what you say and I agree. What my situation with the wiring suggests is that these compliance certificates for electrical safety are not worth the paper they are printed on! Matt (our Son) thought that it would be a quick and easy job simply to replace the feed cable and that would be job done, he traced the rubber clad feed cable and had to lift floor boards upstairs to find where the feed went. In so doing he was confronted by by the mess which all needs replacing. I cannot over state the complete bodge and dangerous condition of our wiring, if we hadn't changed insurance companies I would have merrily accepted that everything seems fine. I really posted as a cautionary tale to others to expect the unexpected. :shock:

 

[MdB]

I took one look at our house wiring and condemned the lot - well apart from the cooker wire which we needed to keep in operation and for which I didn't have a suitably thick replacement wire for.

Guess which wire had a terminal which wasn't tightened up properly and was close to starting a fire?

 

[88v8]

The 1620ish house we just bought had a recent electrical inspection, as a result an RCD board has been fitted by PO. Happily, there was no existing hardware worth conserving, no magnificent mahogany fuseboard with ceramic holders, etched glass cover and brass fittings, just a 60s consumer unit and a couple of standard fuse boxes so no loss there.
In fact, none of the fuseboxes etc was faulty but they were condemned simply because they don't conform to the current regs.
To a degree, asking an electrician to confirm that your wiring needs no work is a case of turkey, Christmas, but the inspections can be very useful, as in the OP's case.

In my view, all hidden wiring in a thatched house should be in metal conduit to protect it from sharp teeth. Once a fire starts, one is a bit stuffed, and the current 'Health & Safety' b***ks ensures that when the fire brigade arrives, they won't climb on the roof with their billhooks to uncover the seat of the fire and deal with it, they'll just stand on the ground piddling water onto the thatch, which, if memory serves, is designed to be waterproof... :?

Did you see that u-tube vid of them not dealing with the fire at the Pandora inn?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-12845752
Forty useless firefighters glued to the ground by their Elfnsafety manual. Makes you want to scream....

It's not that knowledge on fighting thatch fires is lacking,
http://www.playlerussell.com/fighting_thatch_fires.htm
they're just not allowed to do it. Unless someone tells me I'm wrong, has been known. :lol:

Ivor

 

[JoceAndChris]

The OP is very lucky indeed to have found it all out before any harm was done.

You just don't know what's going on until you hack it out, that's the problem. Our wiring, put in by the previous owner, is absolutely meticulous. It was his line of work. And yet even he was not immune to accident and error. Hacking out the dining room circuit we find he accidentally drilled through the cable when mounting the light fitting ( after replastering the channel, presumably). Another lucky escape on our part - it's never been a safe light.

 

[tobydog]

We've had 4 electricians at our house for various reasons over the past 30 months. The first was to check the place (survey) before we bought it, the second and third were on site over a 4 month period when extension / renovation work was carried out. They were the ones who gave it its sign-off for building regs purposes. They did carry out a full check on the existing circuit as well but is was only when we got the 4th one in to carry out some modifications that we were told the light wired into the inglenook was actually connected to the socket circuit!! This has now been removed and a proper socket fitted so we can use a lamp. Even a light switch in the extension had a loose wire that I had to reconnect. Scary stuff and inspires zero confidence in the regulations and procedures.

 

[chuckey]

Just bought a house with a Part P certificate. Trouble found so far :- Utility room, loads of 13A double sockets each fed via a spur box with a single 13A fuse in it. One is particularly bad as we want to plug both the washing machine and tumble drier into it. large shed with a new distribution box with a 32 and a 6 Amp fuse. NO earth back to house or to spike, all circuit earths wired but not to incoming armoured cable.
Self certification - Ha!
Frank

 

[Flyfisher]

As far as I can tell, an installation could have lots of problems but still pass a basic certification because not all the wiring can usually be physically inspected. Thus, inadequate cable sizes would pass all the earth continuity and insulation tests but still be a fire risk due to overloading. Similarly, cables that have been gnawed bare would not be detected except by visual inspection.

I've lost track of all the electrical issues we originally had. Fortunately, we had very little rubber wiring but, even so, there were all sorts of interesting things. For example, the outbuildings were supplied by a single 5A cable spurred off a lighting circuit. I presume this was originally intended only to supply lighting, which was fine. But, over the years, power sockets had been added for various workshop tools. I was curious about why the lighting fuse hadn't blown, until I tracked down the fuse and discovered it had been wired with two30A bits of fusewire!

Parts of the main fusebox and switchgear dated back to the days of porcelain fuses in wooden boxes. All we needed was one of those 'Frankenstein knife-switches' and we could have made our own horror film. Plus, of course, the single leakage breaker would frequently trip out during heavy rain because of the leaky roof.

But it's all tidied up now and went from this:

to this:

The gap on the right-hand wall is where the porcelain fusebox was located.

 

[Penners]

I hope you had LBC for that act of vandalism, FF. You've completely destroyed the unique character of that electrical installation - a heritage asset if ever I saw one.

 

[Flyfisher]

"Unique character" is certainly one description, though 'threat to the true heritage assets' might be a better one.

Here's another little example that I also wantonly removed. The other end of the able was a 4-way plug block.
How about a little competition to see how many faults can be spotted?

 

[Penners]

Do you mean apart from the missing plug top?

If so, I can really only see three little problems:

1. Silver foil (?) around the fuse.

2. No earth (unless it's completely corroded away)

3. Overheated everything.

On the plus side, it's nice to see that the cord grip was used - for safety, presumably!

 

[Flyfisher]

Actually, though it can't be seen in the photo, the earth wire had actually been cut right back to the cable sheath with no attempt at being connected. :shock:

One more . . .

 

[biffvernon]

Time somebody stood up for period electrics. Our village first got electricity in 1953 after the east coast floods. Much of our wiring is the original, rubber sheathed stuff. I had it checked over last year when we installed our solar pv system. No problems at all! I wonder if there were different qualities of rubber?

 

[FamilyWiggs]

Live and neutral wired the wrong way round.

No cover.

 

[Flyfisher]

Well spotted FW, though you can't really claim for the plug cover being removed - I removed that myself to investigate the obvious overheating. I was expecting to find some fuse-tampering but was somewhat surprised about the live-neutral reversal and the cut-back earth wire.

I now keep one of these mains socket testers in my electrics toolkit:
http://www.maplin.co.uk/mains-socket-tester-9800

 

[Flyfisher]

Time somebody stood up for period electrics. Our village first got electricity in 1953 after the east coast floods. Much of our wiring is the original, rubber sheathed stuff. I had it checked over last year when we installed our solar pv system. No problems at all! I wonder if there were different qualities of rubber?

Was all the wiring physically inspected or was the installation itself just electrically checked? The big risk with rubber wiring is for the rubber to become brittle, crack and fall off the wiring. This can leave bare wires, which may pass an electrical test but is clearly a big risk if disturbed. Couple this sort of thing with old fuse boards using fuse-wire that is nowhere near as sensitive to fault conditions as modern MCBs or leakage trippers and the risks stack up.

Old stuff is not always the best stuff.

 

[biffvernon]

The big risk with rubber wiring is for the rubber to become brittle, crack and fall off the wiring.

So they say, but not the case in my house.

 

[Lime]

The big risk with rubber wiring is for the rubber to become brittle, crack and fall off the wiring.

So they say, but not the case in my house.

There were many different types of rubber cable used in the past.
As with PVC there was good and bad.
(Some pvc cables suffer disintegration, peel back or melt too)
The irony of the rubber versus pvc debate is that in good condition rubber is a far superior insulator than pvc.

Wired fuses comply with present day regulations too.

 

[Flyfisher]

Regulations and risk are two different things, as are superior and adequate performance. :wink: