Electric shocks-How long to wait before you call an electrician

This weeks Darwin award is for someone that waited 2 years.

I got a call from a customer to say that she was getting electric shocks off her kettle and deep fat frier (both shiney chrome beasts) when pluged into one particular double socket in the kitchen. She even got a shock off them when the switch on the socket was turned off.

I tried a socket tester. It showed L N reversal. I tried my second socket tester (I keep one in my tool box and one my test case, different makes). That also said L N reverse. I plugged in my proper test meter (a Di-log 9083P) That just flashed L-Pe and L-N and would not perform a test.

The actual problem was not a L N reversal but NO earth at the socket and the earth was shorted to the live. The CPC at the socket is somehow disconnected from the CU earth busbar (>200Mohm) I suspect that there is a junction box under the tiled floor. It is the only socket on the circuit that is not part of the ring.

She has received shocks from this socket since she moved in 2 years ago and only called me as she had a baby 2 weeks ago and the health visitor got a shock when using the kettle and told her to call someone.

That is scary. Two years worth of 230V live lumps of metal sat on a kitchen worktop.

She is only alive due to good luck IMHO.

Adam

Reply to
ARWadsworth
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ARWadsworth coughed up some electrons that declared:

Does make you wonder.

Glad it was not technically a Darwin award after all (but could so easily have been).

Reply to
Tim S

So, you think that the earth is disconnected in a JB under the floor? How did you sort it?

Reply to
Slider

Indeed. So how - if at all - did you fix it?

Reply to
Roger Mills

But now the Stupid Gene has been passed on to her baby.

Reply to
Archie

Archie coughed up some electrons that declared:

I think, to be fair, stupidity is partly a result of our society and education.

People don't have father who do things themselves so much, people are busier so tend to get a man in for everything beyond nailing a picture up and I doubt chemistry lessons involve making low to medium grade explosives (unlike Johnny Gardner's "Christmas specials" bless him).

And TV house makeover programs focus on babbling presenters and people's follies rather than how to actually do stuff.

Barry Bucknall might have given us hardboarded everything, but at least he showed you how to use your tool with pride.

Reply to
Tim S

Snip/

I must have missed that ;-)

Reply to
Archie

I saw something similar back in the 70s. A friend got electric shocks off the cooker, they were mild and they seemed to think this was normal. Apparently this occured for months. Then the dog sniffed the cooker and screamed the place down. And the fried discovered that touching the cooker led to a painful shock. They stopped using the cooker but refused to get an electrician in to look at it. The cooker was only a couple of years old and I was puzzled by someone who would pay thousands for a cooker then just ignore it.

Eventually persistent nagging by friends made them get an electrician in, who had a heck of a job tracing the fault. It turned out to be rats. A rat had chewed through the cable cutting through the earth and exposing the live conductor. Then the rat seemed to have managed to bend the earth leading to the cooker so that it was just touching the live conductor. The earth leading back to the consumer unit was completely severed. This had happened in a void and took some time to diagnose because there was no obvious cause elsewhere.

Reply to
Steve Firth

I don't think that's at all accurate. There are a few scholarly studies of stupidity, they go back to the 1930s. The common conclusion is that stupidity is with is now and has always been with us.

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Reply to
Steve Firth

And preserved all that lovelly panelling under the hardboard. Clever guy actually!

MBQ

Reply to
Man at B&Q

I checked all the other sockets on the ring. They were all on the ring with no spurs from them.

The dodgy socket had clearly been added at a later date than the original installation. The socket was the only one that was a spur. That is why I think there is a JB under the floor.

Also

1) It had white PVC T&E not grey PVC like the rest of the house 2) I could see marks in the plaster below the kitchen worktop that showed where the cable had been filled with pollyfiller and then painted over.

As the CPC at the dodgy socket is >200Mohm at 500V to the earth busbar in the CU I decided to terminate the cable coming up from the floor to this socket with a surface mounted JB. I dug some the cable from the wall to expose it. I then cut the cable and terminated the live end in a JB. This is below the work surface and so not visible

I then took a spur from the socket behind the washing machine and ran a new cable under the kitchen units and added another surface mounted JB to the non live end of the cable that I had cut to repower the socket without damaging the tiles.

Far from ideal. It leaves a JB with a L E short that I have no way of knowing where it comes from. As long as the Megger says the CPC is not in contact with the CU earth busbar there is little else I can do apart from ripping the tiled floor up. There is no chance of that happening.

Adam

Reply to
ARWadsworth

You should leave a note on paper in the dodgy JB telling people who may uncover it in the future that it is dodgy.

But cant you discover which fuse in the consumer unit powers it by removing them one by one?

[g]
Reply to
george (dicegeorge)

It is noted on the certificate I issued.

The downstairs sockets. It is not a radial from the CU:-) Dodgey JB work under the floorboards on that ring it most likely to blame.

Adam

Reply to
ARWadsworth

Depends on if stupidity is a recessive trait or not ;-)

Reply to
John Rumm

Paging Dr Freud! Dr Freud to uk.d-i-y, please!

Reply to
Scott M

About 15 years ago I had a similar call from a friend that said she'd got a shock of the shower head. I thought it pretty unlikely and suggested it might be static electricity, but her boyfriend said he also go a shock off a saucepan (and I really couldn't work that one out). Luckily I'd given them a screwdriver with a neon a few weeks before, so In asked instructed her how to use it on the shower head and she said it lit up. So I got a cab over straight away and discovered virtually everything that should be Earthed was live including the radiators. She said that the incinkerator had stopped working a few days before so I had a look at that. It had been wired up using twin & Earth to a 3 pin plug under the sink and connected to a

4way extention lead. The bare earth wire was not insulated and it looked like the LIVE wire had sprung out of it's terminal and shorted against the Earth wire. Now this should have blown the fuse, but didn't so I assumed that the flat wasn;t Earthed properly or at all. There wasn;t anything I could do except disconnect the insinkerator, so the earth was no longer live. I told them to tell the landlady that the place was a death trap and probably illegal and to get an electrictian in, apparently a cousin had rewired the electrics !!!!!!

The saucepan was live because it was sitting touching the electric metal kettle which was plugged in.

Not sure what hapened next but my friends moved out anyway.

Reply to
whisky-dave

"ARWadsworth" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Five-ten years down the line. She's moved. The certificate's long since gone AWOL. The JB, otoh, is still there - and the new householder is wondering why it's been left hanging there. Hey-ho. Might as well use it for ...

Reply to
Adrian

Many years ago I came across a similar situation. A neigbour mentioned that their electricity bill was much higher than usual and that they had noticed a tingling sensation when taking soap out of the recessed dish in the tiled wall above the bath.

It turned out that when they replaced a light switch a few months earlier the rubber insulation crumbled off a wire which then shorted to the conduit. The conduit was not earthed.

It happened that the unearthed conduit ran behind the bathroom wall tiles very close to the recessed soapdish.

They switched to bathing by candle-light until the house was rewired.

John

Reply to
jrwalliker

Always trust a dog's judgement on such things - they have wet noses and don't wear shoes.

Isn't this a similar situation to the daughter of a TV presenter who dies a few years back, prompting yet another dose of legislation (was it a claimed justification for Part P?) Kitchen has a known "tingle" fault for ages, one day the victim is barefoot, or they happen to lean against a better earth, and they wind up dead.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

It would have to be a thick bastard that uses a JB with the Live and Earth connected into the same terminal to supply power for a new socket.

Adam

Reply to
ARWadsworth

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