Escape or Break?

The fact that it is a damned good safety idea might carry the day though.

Maybe. The idea comes up occasionally in the letters pages of the IET’s magazine, and it’s fair to say that it’s usually controversial.

I have a friend with a career involving power station level metering who was challenged about whether he’d got the correct certification by a bog standard electrician.

As someone with a Masters Degree in things electrical, I’ve a fair bit of sympathy for this, actually. Electrical wiring installations isn’t something that’s taught on more “academic” courses, and there’s a lot of things that the “highly qualified” won’t know unless they’ve gone and learned it for themselves.

Doing domestic installations properly is also a lot more difficult than many DIYers seem to think.

Doing domestic installations properly is also a lot more difficult than many DIYers seem to think.

Oh, I totally agree both on the DIY front and technical¹ one of my uncles was an electrician and always said my stuff was always too textbook overdone. Safe but more work than was needed. My dislike is for the “electricians” that clearly haven’t read and understood the regs because reading is unlikely to be in their skill set never mind understand the words.

That said, having the fuses for the ring main and lighting circuits in my pocket didn’t help when a DIY dips**t had wired the doorbell transformer live to a joint box on the shower feed and the neutral to the cooker feed. As a nod to where they should be he’d fed them through a nearby junction box for the ring main. All work thereafter was in main fuse removed conditions.
When my mother sold the house the new owners got graph paper and overlays showing every ring or feed and every junction box and exactly what wall or rafter (bungalow) they were located on

¹ I picked up and Electrical & Electronic Engineering thing way back when, shifted to things digital, shifted to things network and here I am – go down with cold/flu stagger round work for a day, have two days off and spend the back end of the second fixing the network someone else broke. I’m pretty sure sure who and I’ll see how embarrassed he is tomorrow.

Those little plug-in nightlights quite often just short the LEDs out to make them go off during daylight, which means that they continue to consume the same amount of power while off during the day as they do when on at night…

Not actually true. The current drawn will be very nearly the same (actually a fraction greater) but the phase will shift, reducing the power factor – which will be very nearly zero.

Electrical wiring installations isn’t something that’s taught on more “academic” courses, and there’s a lot of things that the “highly qualified” won’t know unless they’ve gone and learned it for themselves.

This is very true – particularly issues about routing of cables to minimize risks of people sticking screws or nails or drills through them, but also considerations about core cross-sections for cables in different thermal environments. And so on and so forth.

This is very true – particularly issues about routing of cables to minimize risks of people sticking screws or nails or drills through them,

Yes, because a professional electrician would never fit a cable diagonally up a kitchen wall to wire the socket as a part of the ring main upstairs by hooking into a socket on the landing above would they?

Funny bit, I met the actual guy who worked on those houses when he assisted the plumbers doing the boiler refit.¹
Less than funny bit was my mate helping fit cupboards discovering the idiotic placement in the time honoured drill bit vapourising trick. There was vertical capping (empty metal) as well as plastic on the diagonal so a simple detector didn’t pick the cable.

¹ That made things cheaper as he did all the electrics on that project for nothing – his boss told him so (afterward)

Yes, because a professional electrician would never fit a cable diagonally up a kitchen wall to wire the socket as a part of the ring main upstairs by hooking into a socket on the landing above would they?

Depends slightly on your definition of “professional.” The wiring in our house, as it was when we bought the house 24 years ago, was done by a qualified, paid electrician. Apparently. Certified. (He should have been…)

Fortunately I’ve been able to trace the wiring with a detector…well, there’s no diagonals, but there’s a cable that goes halfway up a wall vertically, then horizontally for a couple of metres, then resumes its upward journey. Hmmm – well, he was qualified. And paid. Professional? Depends on your definition, I think.