On Wednesday, 29 November 2017 10:13:57 UTC, Andy Burns wrote:
whisky-dave wrote:

We as in the university campus or rather what managment decide in
order to further their careers. Presently the measured voltage is
215V. Those are the FACTS.

Do you have an estates department? Do they have their own electricians?

Yes & Yes.


If so, why not have a friendly word, get one of them to pop down with a
multi-function tester,

What would be the point they are the ones that brought us (had on order 20 2KW convector heaters) which we couldnt have used do to the college H&S.

and while you've got all your heaters on full
blast, run a PSSC test on another 13A socket on the same circuit?

You see estates only do repairs to existing instalations, so if they came and found a 'fault' like this they would then say to the department well you need to get outside contractors in to 'up' or whatever they will call it to increase the labs capacity, and the last time this happend was about 1996 when we had to go on hands and knees begging whoever to get us upgraded and that cost us £30K.

~6 years ago I was told the lab would be compltety refurbished and the manager at the time gave me some catoloues to choose benches, we have 1/4 million to spend then he apparenlty negoitiated it up to £600k, and together we would turn this into teh best teaching lab in euroope.
A year alter he got promoted after getting estates to install 5 A1 picture frame in the lab and he went on to a higher paid job, the money disapeared or got reallocated to somewhere else.
The new management agreed with me that spending 100K or so on benches was a waste of money as we didn't have decent equipment for teaching so if we had anything to do with it the money would be spent on teaching equipement such as upgrading the labs bench power supplies so we no longer had to use those with analogue meters with labels stuck on them from a previous employee that said next calibration date 1987 ! we went from CRT scopes to LCD and we even brought enough of them rather than buying a few each year.
So that is what happend we brought new equipment and there was no money left for heating or new 'electrics'.
Most other eareas of teh department have been upgraded quite often but who cares about teaching when the money is made in research and administration.