EICR insurance and customers

By Christ.

What was the worst?

Good!

Exposed live cables in the passage way next to the toilets.

Jesus!

Some years ago I was at a house recently purchased by a friend. He was putting boxes in the attic when I thought I saw an orange glow. It disappeared before I really noticed but re-appeared after a bit. It turned out the immersion heater was wired in the attic to the ring main using twin core bell flex. Over time the insulation had burned off and two lose wires were draped over burn marks on the rafters. Whenever the immersion heater came on the current through the bell flex was sufficient to make it glow orange.

It had a recent clear Periodic Inspection Report prepared for purchase of the house.

Scary. Is that proof one should run 2 bellwires in parallel?

No, just use long eye bolts and run your "bell wire" a couple of inches apart and away from the wood work. You don't even need insulation as that will burn off.

Inspection is never 100%, but that should have been tested for L-E loop impedance at every single accessory point and bell wire would have given that an unsually high reading (I would expect a failed reading on a 32A breaker) *even* if they had magically produced an earth (but I'm betting there wasn't an earth at all?)

Pity your friend didn't report the company who signed the PIR...

Your house is wired in knob+tube?

How low down? Protection by placing out of reach is acceptable in non-domestic :-)

Owain

Was that ever used in the UK even under a different name?

Oldest wiring I personally have seen still in place was in a hotels basement where a short length of single bare wires laid in a wooden conduit comprising two grooves moulded in it and a wooden lid placed on top.

GH

Yes, I had that in my first house bought in the 1970s. Late Victorian. It still had the original gas lighting pipes buried in the plaster, many of them still "live" but just soldered shut.

I've never seen K&T here either in person or in any book on the subject. Th e oldest wiring system I'm aware of used bare soft iron wire mounted on cer amic cleat standoffs. This was run across the wall surface, totally bare & live. That approach worked much better with 32v generator powered lighting systems. The 1900s saw a move to insulated copper, mainly rubber insulated but various other things got used, even gutta percha & paper in the early d ays. There was a fair bit of cotton covered wire used, AFAIK it was all cot ton over rubber rather than DCC.

If someone has seen K&T here it would be very unusual. Perhaps wired by an American.

NT

Tim Watts explained :

Earth path would likely be pretty good, via all the copper pipe. The PIR, rather like an MOT, can only express an opinion on what can be seen/ what can be spotted. No quick inspection can possibly spot all issues.

There are some things that even a full PIR will not flag up no matter how diligence the inspector is. You could probably still get a good earth loop reading and IR result when testing that circuit.

Lets just say in this my case bits of insulation tape over burnt out and broken sockets, missing fuse box covers etc started the alarm bells ringing as soon as I started the test.

I had parallel earths in mind.

It was behind the fire extinguisher.

That is what I spotted

and that is what the brown cable looked like when I looked more closely

Cleaner claimed she had mopped that floor the day before:-)

If by that you mean a metal tube with circular boxes at intervals - we've got one bit of that in our house.

Live.

And conforming to the regs AFAIK.

It's the conduit that takes the power to the smoke detector in our thatched roof. And it's the only power up there. Not even a powered aerial amp.

Andy

Was the wiring live or dead?

Vir Campestris >

No , I do know the difference between wood and metal .

Perhaps wooden channel would have been a better term to use. Strip of wood with two slots cut into it with a single conductor in each with a capping tacked over.

Found a picture of something very similar

In that the conductors have insulation around them,in the one I saw the conductors were bare and relied on the wood to insulate.

GH