Walked up our lane and back and marveled at the devil may care way someone has powered their outside lights.
(A cassette type extension hanging freely by the plug to the lights, swinging about against an outside wall)
Cue any number of small boys and their catapults.
would a modern boy know what a catapult is?
gun then
I've seen similar or worse. Outside mains floodlight comes with short cables so extend with a chock block with a few wraps of insulting tape and then for cable support tape the cable to a cast iron rain water down pipe (albeit a painted downpipe).
From suppliers that intend their products to be *only* fitted by the trade, mains flood lights will be supplied in packaging straight after final production testing.
Often this is when the operator has connected just two cores of a 60cm
3-core cable then whacked it onto a test supply, just to see it works.The professional installer will simply throw away that test cable and install it correctly, making sure that the item is earthed and the rest of the installation connected safely, screws tight, water proof etc...
The unwary DIY end user (supplied by eBay/Amazon, with the barest of instructions) will simply instead join that test cable to whatever, and be completely unaware that there is a bare floating unconnected earth wire flopping around inside the case, going absolutely nowhere.
Seen a few on BigClive's teardowns.
I have to say, that behind my electric coal effect fire in the big sitting room is a choc block with two display cabinet lights cables in series so they run at half mains voltage, and then a cable connecting the other ends to a 13a plug. The problem is or was that the tungsten strip lights needed to make the crystal sparkle kept on blowing, and now they are dimmer but never blow, plus you can turn both cabinets off with either switch, but of course this can cause furrowed brows if you accidentally forget which on you switched it off with last time. Brian
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