Pecanfan wrote:
I'll second that, no electrical problem should be allowed to go
unchecked. A couple of days back a friend of mine complained that a
single 13A socket in her kitchen had not worked for a while. I found
that the screw holding the neutral wires was loose, not just slightly
loose but it took 2 or 3 turns to tighten it!


We had the same problem in our flat, only it was the neutral meter tail
which wasn't actually attached to the main RCD in the consumer unit. Only
noticed it by chance - having just moved in, checked the electrics as a
matter of course. There were char marks all around the terminal screw on
the RCD - was quite shocked to find it was only held in by the tension of
the cable itself!


In a hoilday house in dongeal we had for a while the Consumer unit had a
single pole incommer switch disconnector on the live and the netural
went straight to the busbar. But this connection wasn't tightened so
the wire and busbar was very chared.

This was a large CU. It was a hagar din rail unit with three rows / ~14
modules wide, with lots of large ugly screw in ceramic fuses. The house
was wired with 5! lighting radials (6a each), 5 socket radials (almost
ramdom sizes 16 - 32a), cooker, hot water, boiler etc..

The sockets were on a rcd but some of the sockets had there netural
wired to the wrong side of the rcd and of course triped when ever they
were used. Before I learnt the MO of an rcd it just didn't make sense!


Needless to say the electric board didn't pick up on either of these when
they initially came out to re-fit the main fuse. In fact, it's frightening
how blasé the electric board are in general about this sort of stuff. If
there's a gas leak, Transco are out within minutes. If there's an
electrical fault nobody seems to give a damn, IMHO.


The NIE guy who came out to remove the off peak service at my mums home
used a plug in 3 neon type tester (all three neons on, then it must be
wired up correctly), to check out the instalation!

He also reckoned that MK sentry were rubbish and 'you should have bought
a protous (sp?) CU' ...

hmm
--
Peter D

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