MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Pulled my lathe and plaster hall ceiling down a couple of days ago, was looking at it last night as it's being reboarded today and spotted;
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'someone' has scraped the insulation off a couple of sections of cable, twisted a new bit of mains wire around the exposed cables for a spur then wrapped it in a bit of electrical tape 😯
there's another similar bodge a bit further on;
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surprised we've not been fried in our beds or electrocuted 🙁
Having said that, we've lived here more than 5 years and had no problems but last night I worried about it.
Fitted some proper boxes this morning - it turned out the cable didn't go anywhere anyway!
fantastic.
erm that's the same bodge twice!
But aye, pretty shocking.
OMG see what I did there? 😀
might be worth getting a sparky in to do some resistance tests and see if there's evidence of any more bodging in the house...
picked at some plaster when i was replastering a [b]damp [/b]wall in our old house, to find a wire leading to nowhere, buried in filler, with a scotch block on the end.
all totally live, and switched by the main light switch.
eek!
Those are water pipes (looking at the laggin)?
those are central heating I think. There's a couple of water ones near there too, though.
proper 2nd picture posted now, too.
Similar story to tracknicko - except our cables in the walls (for uplighters) were fed off the socket circuit and were permanently on (apparently). Sparky reckoned the jobs had been done by a (BG) gas fitter who'd lived here years ago.
What was also worrying was that the neighbour's gas fire/flue has been condemned at its annual inspection/service visit every year for 20 years by British Gas due to lack of 'suck'. But the one in our (identical) house was in pretty much daily use during that time, including by said engineer. The CH pipe runs he installed are something to behold too!
I'd have a spark in.
Sparky reckoned the jobs had been done by a (BG) gas fitter who'd lived here years ago.
Doesn't surprise me at all. I've experienced some shoddy workmen in Manchester, the worst were (scarily) Registered Gas fitters. I even complained about one to the professional Gas Safe register. None of their business apparently. Only my local councils building works kicking off changed things.
When we were having a new bathroom put in this spring, the fitter touched an old lead water pipe he found under the floorboards whose end had been crimped and soldered. It fell straight off where it can out of the wall and gas came streaming out.
Turned off the gas at the mains.
When the house was built, it was built with a lead pipe gas lighting circuit, that had ended up not being used as electric lights came in during a delay in building. That circuit was still connected to the mains supply. In fact, the boiler we'd had installed 18 months earlier was running off a copper pipe that was spurred off that lead pipe.
Al - where's that pic of your disc brake mount? 😀
😀
NOt mine:
[url= http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7207/6823106916_bb92e234df_z.jp g" target="_blank">
[url= http://www.flickr.com/photos/7693620@N05/6823106916/ ]IMAG0122[/url] by [url= http://www.flickr.com/people/7693620@N05/ ]alan cole[/url], on Flickr
Here's mine:
[url= http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6215/6237174444_2c0ab59415_z.jp g" target="_blank">
[url= http://www.flickr.com/photos/7693620@N05/6237174444/ ]IMAG0785[/url] by [url= http://www.flickr.com/people/7693620@N05/ ]alan cole[/url], on Flickr
Used to work on a remote Welsh farm and some of the bodges I used to see used to scare the hell out of me, talking late 1970's.
Nails replace fuses in a old 3 phase fuse box! 😯
Broom handles used to switch on grain elevator, because it would give you a deadly electric shock otherwise!
Tractors that had no brakes
A Pickup that only had a reverse gear was used on the road for years to ferry cattle food from field to field.
Bailing twine used to patch or repair virtually anything that broke, that included shoring up a RSJ in a barn, where a tractor had taken a wall out!
Not to mention the Old Man's Dad who used to hide in ditches and creep up on you working, then let off his shotgun over the top of you, just to keep you on your toes!
Looking back, I did quite well to walk away breathing from that farm!
When we first moved into our current house, the previous owners kindly left a two bar electric fire behind. It was very old and I don't think we ever used it so after sitting around for a year I decided to get rid. Thinking ahead I thought I'd take the standard three pin pug off to reuse as and when, only to find the 13 amp fuse inside had been wrapped in tin foil!
So glad we never turned that fire on.
Similar electrical one:
Extractor fan in the bathroom was not coming on when it was supposed to.
Opened it up. It has three terminals inside: neutral, live from mains and switched-live from the light switch (the idea being that the light switch tells it to come on and the mains allows it to stay on for 10 minutes after the light is turned off).
Someone obviously didn't have any 3-core cable handy when they installed it. So they used cable with 2 cores and one bare earth wire running through it like this:
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Naturally the bare earth had been used as the live mains wire. Lovely.
At least it explained the strange buzzing sound!
Went round to help a friend who'd unsuccessfully swapped the face plates on a 2 switch setup at the top and bottom of the stairs. He'd done this a couple of years ago, but finally got hacked off with it not actually being a double switching arrangement.
Anyway, basically he'd bought a single way switch for the end of the switching circuit and so decided he didn't need the common wire so just tucked it into the back box. it was just luck it hadn't made connection with the back box and made the face plate screw live!
The whole thing had only worked because he's stuffed the common wire in to switched side of the 2 way switch at the other end!
I've removed all his privileges for working on anything electrical!
GrahamS we have the same kitchen flooring!
Nails replace fuses in a old 3 phase fuse box
My folks moved into a new build 3 storey house with a lift installed. When it stopped working after a couple of years, the repairer found exactly this on some fuses. It took ages to fix it properly, as surprisingly enough it kept blowing fuses when they where put in!
GrahamS we have the same kitchen flooring!
Nope, you have the same flooring as someone who exports cables from Zhejiang in China:
http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/325486982/Flat_Twin_and_Earth_Cable_1.html
😀
😀
I don't reckon much to the sweating on your joints either, that's a lot of solder. Looks like an 'home' job
Stripped back plasterboard in my brothers flat so find similar wiring practices to the OP, but instead insulation tape bare wires had been twisted together them stuck into blobs of wet plaster on the back of the board
Some bodges in evidence in my caravan electrics. Although I don't really know what, cos I have no idea what cables are 12V and what are mains - there's no consistency. Some of it's two core appliance flex, some of it's three..
nearly burnt down the same house now i remember. changed the light fitting in the kitchen. wired it up wrong (my mistake) flicked it on...
instead of fuse blowing, the switch melted itself into the on position, and promptly set fire to/melted all the cabling through the roof space back to the basement, filling the house with acrid smoke.
ran down to the basement to find just that one circuit i was working on, replaced with a nail instead of a fuse.
had to run upstairs and rip up carpet to make sure no fires were ongoing!
****ing thing!!!
Similar experience with wiring...
Moved in to our current house and decided to decorate my daughters bedroom, stripped the wallpaper and noticed two lines of plaster repair running diagonally up the wall, the point of convergence was the mains socket. isolated the mains and took off the cover plate to find two cables still wired in that had been used for wall lights. The lights had been removed and the plaster made good but leaving live wiring in the wall 🙁
Since discovered that this was very much the house that Jack had owned and rebuilt...
Wow - amazing what goes on out there...
got involved in sorting a house a friend had bought a few years back.
The previous owner was a well-meaning ex-electrician who had sadly become wheelchair bound. His hobby became tinkering with the house electrics
so we had
4 room thermostats (3 downstairs) all competing with each other
junction boxes tucked away in all kinds of odd places near water etc
a hilarious lighting cicrcuit interaction where the function of the downstairs switches chnaged depending if the bathroom light was on or off.
what is it about home electrics that makes them fair game to have a go at?
TM
ours had more spurs than you could imagine. Spent ages removing all of them, including one to the electric fire. Sockets near the draining board (always usefull)
Doing it properly appears not worth it for some people, although if you follow everything to the letter exactly you would have to demolish most of the walls to refit a plug socket.
a mate lifted his floorboards a while ago and found that his gas pipe (which ran in an L shape through the room) - about 15 ft then right angle then 8 ft was completely unsupported except at the corner of the L, was an Ever Ready rubber coated torch, stood on end with the pipe resting on it, presumably as it was exactly the correct length
Bought a house owned by bodgers!
Garage connected to the house with 60 feet of unsupported interior twin and earth cable, with no catenary wire, strung down garden at head height...
Running anything at high load in the garage caused it to sag. Finally replaced (properly - underground, armoured, in conduit) when it got to neck height...
Then outside loo connected to garage with another head height spur going over the pond!
That's just the start of it too...
moved into a house recently
was rewiring my garage with heavy duty cable and 32amp fused system so i can run my welder properly.
had i plugged my welder or even a kettle into the old system i reckon id have set the place on fire .... weediest cable ive ever seen which was extended 3 times with the use of junction boxs cutting across the back bedroom wall at 45 degrees - from top left hand corner to bottom right.
found the thermostat controller for the heating in the garage roof space......
the shower waste has a negative run on it to the soil stack so i get air locks and dont have free running waste on the shower atm !
Sockets near the draining board (always usefull)
My girlfriends mum has a space in an artists studio complex. The owners had the whole place refitted, remodelled and renovated. I don't know if it was down to architects or the contractors but it seems that the [i]only[/i] place to fit a socket is directly above a sink.
"Garage connected to the house with 60 feet of unsupported interior twin and earth cable, with no catenary wire, strung down garden at head height..."
ive got that tooo - straight into the coal shed where there are/were 2 live exposed wires coming off a spur thats been ripped out a light switch before then running along the wall to the other garage.
didnt have time to fix it so went into the fuse board - switched it off , unwired it and ripped it out the roof to save someone trying to use it when im away !
had the rest of the house tested - just seems to be the fellas extension electrics that are dodgy. oh and the coal skuttle he stuck up the chimney to act as a flue .... removed and replaced with the real deal !
Friend of mine bought his first house, complete with brand new central heating installed throughout.
He had been in about 2 months when his wife phoned to say the gas combi boiler had "moved" when she shut the cupboard door!
Turns out the previous owner had bodged the whole lot himself, with the main issue that the gas combi boiler was not attached to the wall, but lay resting/leaning on a shelf against the wall with all the piping linked through holes cut into the wooden MDF shelf. Other bodges included plastic connectors, dodgy joins, dented pipes and stripped connections to radiators. Managed to salvage 2 radiators out of the whole lot, the rest had to be completely replaced.
Naturally the bare earth had been used as the live mains wire. Lovely.
had this in our house - except they had left the earth shield marker on as well!
thv3 - 😯
I live in a house that's been converted into two maisonettes. So my kitchen was once a bedroom. the original 2 single sockets had been extendended to 4 double sockets, connectors were wrapped in tape and plastered into the walls. Nice diagonal runs also.
this thread makes me feel much better about the only slighty shonky electrics in my house.
hope you didn't put it back with junction boxes...
In the process of buying my first house. Might get a pro in to look everything over!
Might get a pro in to look everything over!
Where's the fun in that 😉
My house has been chronically bodged for almost 100 years, renovating the upstairs has been a voyage of discovery where plumbing/heating/electrics are concerned. It now has all new radiators/sockets/lighting, oh and a ring main, rather than spurs 😯
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We have found a few, my sister and her then boyfriend bought a place in London, when the sellers had moved out MrPP noticed that the roof/ceiling did not look "quite" right. When they had someone to look at it and the previous owner had taken out some roof struts so they could store more junk in the attic. The roof had to be completely redone - luckily it was a hot sunny summer!
My grandads place had a wire hanging out of the wall he was told it was not live. However the handyman found out that it was live. Luckily he was just a bit bruised and shocked. They also found nails through cables in the loft.
When we had our electrics done last year they found that the cables were connected with the things they call chocolate boxes.
Not dangerous but when we got our kitchen re plastered they found an arch in the wall that was not quite symmetrical - more leaning tower of Pisa looking!
BTW getting a pro to look it over if a problem does arise then they say "could not get into loft as full" to cover them. If you buy a place that has not got an electrical certificate assume it needs to be done.
When we bought our (part renovated) house, the old owner told us he had tested the chimney and everything was fine.
Just to be on the safe side (as we were fitting a woodburner) we had a smoke test done and it was leaking all over.
The old owner was a fireman. 😯
If we hadn't checked it ourselves he might have been coming to drag our charred remains from the shell of the house.
When we bought our current place it needed gutting - thankfully
Floorboards up in most rooms and ceiling down on a few meant we found no end of electrical bodges - how the place had never burned down we'll never know...
Fully rewired and plumbed now... no bodges, least none were aware of....!
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damo2576 - picture from Brazil (or somewhere S. America) ?
I remember those shower heads from Brazil when I was there a couple of years ago, although I never saw one quite as bodged as that!
OP I've seen 3 phase cables joined like that in the exhibition halls in Bangkok.
LOL at damo's pic...I took a shower under something like that in a Peruvian hotel, I felt reasonably relaxed until sparks came out of it. I checked out shortly after.
Electric underfloor heating control box fitted on side panel of bath.
Cooker wired to 13A extension cable on plug socket ring in kitchen.
Twin and Earth feed to garage buried 4" underground down side of drive.
Switch to sockets in garage wired in upsidedown ie.- On = Off .
Never had a shock off anything though.
[i]In the process of buying my first house. Might get a pro in to look everything over! [/i]
Current house was only a year old when we bought it, one socket in the lounge is connected to the Immersion circuit and the other is a ring-main all by itself. The garage sockets were spurred off the smallest bedrooms' socket, and its light came off the bedroom light too. And don't even ask about the cooker...
Oh, another one. The house had a single patio door, the type that pops back and then slides behind the fixed pane.
The glass wasn't safety marked.
Then our builder noticed that the door's lower edge was lower than the floor inside, so someone had laid laminate floor up to a point, then concreted a small slope down to the lower edge of the door. They'd also removed a course of bricks to fit it in, which took the door down through the DPC. We think they'd bought a cheap door which didn't fit the existing 'ole, so made 'adjustments' accordingly.
Not exactly dangerous, but bloody shoddy and 2 families have lived here with a very bad trip hazard for the main route out of the back of the house.
SWMBO has just reminded me of the kitchen, and the roof, and the boiler problems too...
Don't fit 240V spots in lathe and plaster ceilings or your house may burn down... this was why our circuit kept tripping. All lights now replaced with low voltage (low heat) variety. And yes the insulation has smouldered away to bare wire 😐
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MrsPoddy - Member
When we had our electrics done last year they found that the cables were connected with the things they call chocolate boxes.
Think you mean "Chocolate Block" type connectors (ie plastic terminal strips which may be cut to the appropriate length)
Like these [img]
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Oh and Rich_s, Jan remembers your gas fitter previous owner 😮
Did the wife remind you to fit that cowl I modded for you
I bought a 1960's house here, nice solid house but **** me the person that had been bodging was clearly tired of living. Thankfully step 1 of moving in was to drop all the cielings and remove all the GIB.
During that I found:
Double plugs in bedroom spurred off another plug in the next door room, to save time they simply ran normal mains cable out the wall under the weatherboard and back in the wall in the bedroom.
Completely burned out wiring on all the downlighters in the bathroom. No RCD just a main fuse replaced with a nice bit of #8 wire.
3 completely live metal switch boxes thanks to the pro sparky obviously picking the wires he liked and simply bending the rest back
A complete 3 phase circuit connected to nothing other than dangling wires in the loft, all live. Thank **** it was in the far corner.
Was quite a special place. We ripped it all out and started again. Scary though, my apprentice builder welded himself to a light box - was weird as the main power box was off. Then we found the second supply coming in the basement under the shed (!). Had a meter and everything but nobody was paying for it. Utterly odd.
A recently renovated flat, the cooker hob abnnd oven wired to 13 amp plugs .
Customer had removed the banister and spindles from the stairs, me carrying a door down slipped sideways off stairs after she put a dust sheet on them before moving the kids toy cars.
Hot wate connected to toilet cistern, flushing hot water.
Cold water main connected to gas pipe, when the gas was switched on water flowing from cooker hob, and flooded the gas main, huge disruption, while the water was sucked out.
Dodgy bathroom floor, lifted the chipboard and numerous wires going everywhere all combi blocked together,
7kw shower connected to 13 amp mains plug,with screw for a fuse, strong smell of melting plastic when shower being used,only once thankfully.
large upvc window, 5 foot high and 3 foot wide, in a hotel ,just foamed into opening of brickwork, as it was a fire escape window opening the window inwards caused the window to almost fall on us.
Naturally the bare earth had been used as the live mains wire. Lovely
yep, had that as well. Except it was done by pros as well rather than by home owners. Sometimes home owners actually get it right
Said 'pros' also managed to wire between two theoretically isolated circuits as well so when you hit the isolation switch the circuit was still live due to being connected to the other circuit :(. I ALWAYS check if something is live now even if it is switched off.
I was also fortunate in checking that the gas had been switched off just before another set of folks cut through some 'old' pipework with a disk cutter. Said pipe was still connected to gas 😯