Electrical socket installed under sink for new kitchen dishwasher installation

[Scott]

Of course I accept that. I used the words 'unnecessary risk'. I would not want to increase the risk if it could be avoided and try to keep water and electricity apart.

[NY]

Don't joke! My parents have a holiday cottage that they go to in the summer but not in the winter. We went over to spend Christmas there and found the lounge carpet was soggy. The bath in the bathroom above the lounge was full to the brim with water and was at the level of the overflow. Unfortunately the overflow didn't drain into the waste pipe from the back, or to an outside overflow pipe; instead it was not connected. It turned out that one of the bathtaps dripped, and the water had gradually frozen in the waste pipe where it ran down the outside wall. This meant that the drips could not escape and so came out of the overflow. It was "fun" dismantling sections of the downpipe and shaking/prodding them to try to get all of the plug of ice out. If it hadn't been the *bath* downpipe that had frozen up, I'd have put each length of pipe in warm bathwater to melt the ice ;-)

The water had drained into several eyeball spotlights in the ceiling, though fortunately this did not trip the lighting circuit when I put the lights on before realising about the flood. I decided that the best thing to do was to leave them on so the heat from the tungsten bulbs would dry the area, once I'd removed each fitting and dried things as much as possible with a cloth (with that lighting circuit turned off!).

Our house had a 3-pin socket in the bathroom, about 1.5 m from a washbasin and the same distance from a shower cubicle. There was no bath near by, so less danger of splashed water. But it still looked very dodgy to have a socket there.

When we had some building work done which needed an electrician, I asked him to comment and he said (as I expected) that it was definitely not allowed - one of those things which electricians are asked to look out for when doing other unrelated work. He removed the socket and installed a waterproof blanking cover, having presumably safely terminated the ring main cables that led to/from it.

[Andrew]

That will change considerably with age :-)

[Scott]

I did not write this. Please attribute to the correct poster. Scott

[snip]

[Tim Lamb]

Lucky to get beyond your feet:-(

[Scott]

This would be my commonsense approach also.

[Mike Clarke]

.. and you use it in the kitchen?

[Scott]

I remember at my primary school there were four sets of toilets: the big boys' and wee boys' toilets in one block and the big girls' and wee girls' toilets in the other.

At one stage work was needed in the girls' block and the boys were told to use the big boys' toilets and the girls the wee boys' toilet. The wall between the two sections was only partial and did not reach the ceiling. Someone worked out it was possible to piss over the wall on to the girls' heads. Of course they could never find out who the culprit was!

[John Rumm]

So long as you apply a little common sense (like not fitting the socket directly under pipework), there no risk that you would not have with a socket anywhere. One could argue you are less likely to splash water in a cupboard in a kitchen than you are somewhere else in a kitchen that might be near a socket on a wall.

[John Rumm]

Socket on the wall behind the dishwasher[1], with a separate isolation switch above worktop level is one way, or a socket in an adjacent cupboard (that may have a sink over it!) is also common. You don't necessarily need the idolater if the socket is easy to reach.

[1] I wired a neighbours cooker like that when I rewired their house. She managed to trip the RCD by spraying copious amounts of flash on the tiles above the cooker, such that it ran down the wall, and eventually soaked into the plug connected to the socket.

With hindsight, socket in the adjacent cupboard would have probably been better!

[John Rumm]

Socket on the wall behind the dishwasher[1], with a separate isolation switch above worktop level is one way, or a socket in an adjacent cupboard (that may have a sink over it!) is also common. You don't necessarily need the idolater if the socket is easy to reach.

[1] I wired a neighbours cooker like that when I rewired their house. She managed to trip the RCD by spraying copious amounts of flash on the tiles above the cooker, such that it ran down the wall, and eventually soaked into the plug connected to the socket.

With hindsight, socket in the adjacent cupboard would have probably been better!

[Max Demian]

Whenever he goes to piss in the sink it's full of his wife's dirty dishes.

[zall]

He didn't say you did. Count the >s

He did.

[Scott]

And that was???

[ARW]

You would not believe some of the electrical criminal damage we used to do when I was at school.

It's a good job they did not have CCTV in schools in my day.

One of the favourites was holding the lightswitch that powered the fluorescents in the half on half off position so that it made a buzzing sound and eventually started to smoke.

Inserting 13A plugs with a LN short across them was another favourite.

[Andrew]

One 'interesting' kid stole lots of light bulbs from around the school and filled up the toilet cistern with them (the type that is above head height and periodically flushed the boys urinals).

One day another athletic lad decided to climb up the flush pipe to see how many were up there and the whole lot crashed down onto the floor and smashed to pieces. This was a heavy ceramic cistern too.

mains water pissing out everywhere

[Mark Carver]

Don't be silly, we've got a dishwasher, and I've just measured, its 13A socket is indeed 300mm horizontally away from the tap column.

[Adam Funk]

Did this influence your career choice?

;-)

[Robin]

I don't think judges had the discretion to offer a choice between prison and an apprenticeship :)

[Jonathan]

That's what my insurers say with regard to structural damage from flooding.

Jonathan