Wilson's Workshop Waffle

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jb3cx:
In answer to hermetic I'm in the north east (Sunderland) the house my mate lives in belongs to the council,apparently every few years the houses are picked at random for an inspection ,just to see that the tennents are keeping the property in good order as per the tenancy agreement,in 25 years this is the first time he has had them in .the inspection team had some concerns about the wiring ,and they sent out the guy to inspect the workshop wiring,

SwarfnStuff:
Just reading through the various posts re. wiring, are you actually able to wire your workshop? Here in OZ anything to do with the power (240V AC :zap:) must be done by a qualified, certified, registered, expensive electrician. And you will pay extra for a certificate of compliance that you will possibly never actually receive.
Similarly with Plumbers, they are a protected species and whilst I have never heard of anyone getting into strife for changing a tap washer I think we're not supposed to do that either according to the letter of the regulations.
Ah rools and regs, don't you just love em?
To be fair though, it is easy to kill someone with dodgy wiring.
John B

hermetic:
Hi Rob and all, Ah! it's a council house, just a bit of bad luck then, but sensible idea to protect the cable. Yes PeteW, I have looked into it, and I have fitted a lot of Kingspan and cellotex, but generally someone else has been paying for it! Jablite is now "self-extinguishing" whereas kingspan and cellotex, are "fire retardent", but at the end of the day, they both burn, and the jablite lasts better than kingspan/cellotex, because the foil film on the expensive stuff is there not only to reflect radiated heat (of which, in most houses there is very little anyway) but also to maintain the gas pockets in the foam to give it its 25 year lifespan. By the time the insulation catches fire, I would be in the next county anyway!. Andrew, yes I know about the polystyrene/pvc reaction, and it doesnt take that long as I have seen some bits of recent loft wiring alredy melting into the polystyrene, which is one of the reasons all the wiring is coming out of the roof space. In the domestic end of the building, (which is an early victorian 2up and 2down now reroofed, windowed and pointed, well neartly) all the loft wiring is clipped out of the way.

Swarfnstuff, well I used to be that qualified and certified registered (but nowhere near expensive enough) electrician, but to be honest, wiring most worshop systems is hardly rocket science, there is a lot of information out there on how to do it properly, and it MUST be done properly! and in the UK today, lots of people are coming out of the armed forces with no experience in any engineering discipline and paying between £3500 and £5000 to be trained as domestic electricians in 5 WEEKS! I did a five year apprenticship and 3 years at Tech college!
Phil

John Rudd:
Phil,
Although I'm not a qualified spark, I did a four yr apprenticeship plus college as an instrument tech at ICI, so there is some overlap in trades....I worked with my brother many yrs ago who was a spark, on some housing estate doing rewires.... It was hard graft then in the 80's
So those coming out of the forces and paying £3-1/2k to do house bashing are welcome to it....it aint easy... I wonder how many of them can do volt drop calcs for cables?

hermetic:
Hi John, well they are supposed to teach them the rudiments of cook book electrical calcs, but they get coached through the exam anyway, so what difference does it make? I still do a bit of domestic work, but was mainly on industrial and agricultural installs and maintenance for most of my electrical career, and when part P came in, it was a good excuse to refuse the work, although I got my arm twisted by a mate, and did a big part P install under the watchfull eye of the local BCO Elec, who outranks me as he has an HNC to my NC, it was another year of Tech that I should have done, but couldnt face another year squinting at a guessing stick (slide rule) as in those days an electronic calculator cost about 5 weeks wages! TBH I don't think anyone does any calculations for volt drop for domestic installs, and much of what gets put on completion certificates is made up on the fly rather than the results of a ridiculously complex and totally unneccasary testing regime, which seems more designed to cover the sparkies backside rather than achieve a high level of safety. The blind reliance on mcb/rcd/rcbo (none of which fail safe) technology is going to burn houses down in the future! The electrical trade is in gradual meltdown.

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