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;

‘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;

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 damp 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:

IMAG0122 by alan cole, on Flickr

Here’s mine:

IMAG0785 by alan cole, 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:

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!

**** 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 only 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!