Many people don’t know in my previous life I was originally trained as a Multi-Skilled Electronics Technician, trained by way of an apprenticeship at Birds Eye Walls in Lowestoft in England. The first year of training was all at the Lowestoft college where I spent my time working lathes and milling machines, then later wiring things up as an Electrician. A number of years in the factory training as an electrician followed as well as another year (later) in the Great Yarmouth College of Further Education left me with a broad base of training required to be an electrician. Needless to say over the years this training has been useful at home and at work as well as to provide pocket money and assistance to friends.
There are times though when I think it might have been more beneficial to have not trained as I often find myself presented with problems that I could really do without…!
Today was no exception. Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo before I started this 2 minute job that turned into half a day’s nightmare.. I did however take a couple of photos when the realisation of what I was in for dawned on me. The “little job” was to fix or replace an unswitched single socket in the lounge of my new house. When the Melita cable man had been a few days earlier, he connected the lightening arrestor/cable earth to the socket (or so I thought.) When he left I noticed the socket was not fully flush against the wall and paid it little attention. A day or so later I added the HD player to the setup and on plugging it in to a multi-way adapter dislodged the socket and it hung loosely. I figured it was not secured properly and thought to myself, “no problem I’ll replace it with a new switched socket, or even a double socket if I could. I decided this morning (a Sunday morning so all the hardware stores are closed… brain of Britain I am!) to do the replacement, first I isolated the power and then and set to work promptly unscrewing the existing socket this is where I noticed the start of the troubles. The screws were not screwed into anything and were easily removed (to easily) I inched the socket forward and disconnected the active (Live/Red) cable, then the return (Neutral/Black) cable. At this point any electrician will know that something is wrong, you should disconnect the earth (Green or Green/Yellow) first as there are often exposed bars that you can short your screwdrivers to which will trip a RCD (Earth Leakage Circuit Breaker).. not really a problem unless you’re working by the lights and you’re in an older house that has been adapted to use an RCD and everything is running through the RCD.
The reason for the omitting of the Earth terminal was that I could see substantial corrosion and wanted to get a better look before touching anything. Of course it wasn’t as easy as that, as the whole socket came away in my hand as shown in the first picture…
Next thing I noticed was the fact it all came away and the earth was not attached!! Severe corrosion had rusted away the terminal. Not only that but the same severe corrosion had rusted away the screw mounts, hence why the socket was not actually attached to anything.
Here began my quandary. My next step was to assess the damage, the next pictures graphically depict the extent of the problem..
..and finally the wall box itself…
notice that the very helpful idiot from Melita Cable had not warned me of anything, and infact did a damn good job at hiding the issue by pointing the earth cable at the bottom of the socket, embedding it into the crumbling plaster nicely hiding the fact the socket was damaged, unsecured and more importantly, not EARTHED!
Net result was Mr Melita had attempted to connect to the back of a socket, had then not connected anything as had finished of the socket. I know it’s not him who broke it, but I think as a very minimum issue he should have highlighted that he was unable to earth the cable and that the socket was a health hazard waiting to kill someone.
Net result was several hours of graft cleaning up what was left of the socket, noting that in 1966 the builders/electricians of Malta buried steel conduit into walls connecting them to standard galvanized steel in wall boxes. Now I was unable to get the reminants of the socket out of the wall so I secured an earth to the existing un-corroded conduit, and to the cable, used a wall mounted plastic box to cover the hole and crossed my fingers. I’m afraid to check the Earth Loop resistance, but note that now I know I am only plugging in double insualted earthless devices in the hope that nothing goes wrong before I replace the wiring completely.
Now back to the title, as you probably guessed by my little story, it is mostly referring to the incident with the socket and the fact it wasn’t earthed at all. In fact it goes further, as someone who knows what electricity can do and has a very healthy respect for it, I’m not about to leave any of the other sockets to chance, and checked a few on the ground floor. Result: the whole house is as bad and needs a complete re-wire!!!
None of which was picked up on the survey…
NOT HAPPY JAN!
