RIP DIY - longish rant

[Capitol]

This approach is largely crap! If you want to live in a risk free environment then perhaps a goldfish bowl would be suitable.

The average plumber/electrician/builder is largely trained by experience, what he/her got wrong, like the rest of us. The prospect of being sued does not apply to the average cowboy builder, he has no assets, and only people with assets get sued! The experiences of most of us are that the chance of getting a GOOD job done by a supplier is at best a 1 in 4 possibility. Yes, the average plumber learns a bit more every year, but very few ever go on a manufacturers training course, most operate by reading the instructions, throwing them away and doing it like the last one. Electrical wiring is a very interesting area. The IEE regulations are a GUIDE to good practice and not mandatory. They can't be, as the paperwork required to cover every eventuality would dwarf even the treasury's manual on taxation. I have seen the test specification of a modern defence system equivalent in complexity to a consumer PC, reach 600 pages of A4( largely unnecessary), imagine the test specification for a flat in a block!

If people wish to live in the nanny state, then they are welcome to do so, but IMO the effects are going to be a continuous degradation of living standards over the next 20 or so years. All businesses fail when the overhead costs exceed the capacity/willingness of the customer to pay for them and further increases in regulation will simply lead to people ignoring them even more than they do at present. We want much less regulation, and greater willingness to accept risk if we want a viable future.

Regards Capitol

[Capitol]

Come on, positive approach, Darwin.

Regards Capitol

[jacob]

Easy peasy - you just have to remember that it comes out in reverse if you are doing it infront of a mirror - MUM is ok though

cheers

Jacob

[G&M]

Since the test spec for Windows exceeded 28000 pages back in 1997, (hate to think how big it is now) either the defence system is almost untested or somebody in Seattle isn't doing a good job with their testing.

[Capitol]

I think we all know that Windows is untestable, as it doesn't actually work, hence more B/S is needed to cover up the fact.

Regards Capitol

[geoff]

In message , Andy Hall writes

I used to have a customer who had been on all the courses, passed exams, had a car full of boiler manuals and course notes.

He was totally useless

[Mike Mitchell]

I absolutely know where you're coming from. My gas fitters charged £40 to disconnect the hob, then two days later another £80 to connect the new cooker. Total time spent: 30 minutes. The cooker itself only cost £250. I believe the situation with tradespeople in the UK has become dire, yet there will come a point when I am just too old to do it myself and will have to rely on the cowboys. I can only hope that before then some government will be in power to apply proper regulations to the entire industry. That stupid programme on BBC where the guy is driving arund the country in a bus by a driver who never speaks is a total waste of a half-hour programming slot. The programme is just making a bit of flippant "edutainment" and not addressing the problems we all face anything like seriously enough.

MM

[Owain]

"Capitol" wrote | The IEE regulations are a GUIDE to good | practice and not mandatory.

The IEE regulations are mandatory in Scotland - they are cited in the Building Regulations.

They are also, de facto if not de jure, mandatory in workplaces under the H&SAWA.

Owain

[N. Thornton]

advise on these procedures

country, then the matter is

do have a comeback on

these organisations,

be installing that type

interest?

To be honest I think a reality check is needed here.

1. IME every bit as much professional work is incompetent and muppet-like as DIY work.

1. The vast majority of DIYers are carry out work competently. Those without the necessary level of competence rarely touch electrics or gas, for reasons I could go into separately.

2. The few that are dangerous are not likely to follow any new rules anway, since they make no attempt to follow or get informed about the existing ones. Hence legislation against such work is ineffective.

1. The new drive for professionalism unreasonably penalises all DIYers, while having no effect on the dangerous few.

2. The only visible 'benefit' is to the wallets of the trades concerned, members of which routinely charge rip off prices for poorly done jobs that most of us can do for close to nothing and to far higher standards ourselves.

1. There is no serious justification for preventing those who are competent from doing their own DIY work of any shade, whether it be electrical, gas, structural, heating, whatever. Competence should be all that matters. The new drive claims to discriminate on grouns of competence, but in reality does not at all.

I suppose for completeness I should ask if you are in one of these trades yourself?

Regards, NT

[N. Thornton]

thickness

1 Lots of tradespeople are neither properly informed nor competent. 2 This is a trivial matter, affecting MTBF, not safety. 3 The changes carried out by manufacturers will do the job.

joiner or

no no. One does not need paper qualifications or certification to gain knowledge. As you pointed out above. Lots of good sound info is given out here on uk.d-i-y by people with no paper qualification in the subject theyre discussing. We're talking DIY here, not brain surgery.

whether one gains the knowledge by research before the job or by a training course a few years prior is immaterial.

No, youre evading the point here. The point is that ripoff prices are being charged for an officially certified muppet to inspect and pass work that has been done by someone more competent than themselves, time after time. I have watched enough such inspections to know that probably half of them barely know what theyre doing. Its not been just once that I've had to explain to them whats going on - even with some very simple matters. In reality these inspectors are not all competent themselves.

While most laws are sound, as you well know they are also created in response to political agendas and questionable reports. The reality is there is very little support for some of the latest drives towards professsionalism, and with perfectly good reason.

Regards, NT

[N. Thornton]

snip.....

amount of

for that

overhead

this is both impossible and undesirable, since each job varies from the next in many details. Not just parts and work, but also things like access and other issues. Building work is full of issues.

Setting charge per hour also does not work, since a) the worker will then have an incentive to work as slow as possible b) it takes no account of the quality of each individuals work c) it is wrongly anti-competitive.

Regards, NT

[N. Thornton]

Sadly there are also a great number who, while not being useless, are incompetent and unsafe. And I'm talking about people who have passed exams.

The British public today has a very unrealistic view of exams and bits of paper. The reality is that a) of the official exams I took I'm sure I've forgotten the vast majority of the material covered. b) The pass percentage required on most exams is so low as to make those who pass routinely not competent. c) many idiots manage to pass exams: they might know the contents of the course, but still be dangerous due to sheer stupidity - have seen this many times.

If you want to see a monumental testament to the failure of exams to produce safe practitioners, look at GPs. The standards are... not good.

Regards, NT

[N. Thornton]

10 deaths per year in Britain from both appliances and fixed wiring. One can only guess at the number of these that are from fixed wiring alone: probably much less than 1 per year. Even if it were as many as 9 per year, this would be one of the safest activities known to our society.

A huge amount of expense is being placed on us under complete pretence. Many have said so, many with far bigger voices than me. If the welfare of the people were being considered at all, this extra expense would be spent on something where it is genuinely needed, not on paperwork that will achieve literally nothing.

I've done car brakes, electrical fitting, worked with 18M concentrated acids, various toxins, made life and death decisions... lets compare.

Of the brakes I've had done professionally, some were downright dangerous. None of my own work was. Professional mechanics are so clueless most of them think that if one half fails in dual system brakes, the other brakes will still work. They will not, not even a bit.

Of the goods I've bought from professional sources, a few have been irresponsible or dangerous on the toxin side, my work has not been.

And when it come to life and death decisions, some I've made have been in dircet contradiction to highly qualified professionals after I have checked out the facts thoroughly and documented why they have got it wrong. In the majority of cases they have eventually accepted my case and acted accordingly. Even in cases where I have no paper quals in their field and they are highly respected. Had a case of this just recently, and the person is now alive thankfully.

This is a scary idea to many, that someone without the bit of paper could read up and get their facts straight, and someone with the bit of paper could get things so wrong as to cause death to those in their care. But its all documentable.

Yet it should all come down to paperwork? I think those who put this paperwork on such a high pedestal are those who are unable to think for themselves, and never dare question a professionals decision. If they do so they will find just how imperfect people are.

Courses exams and paperwork _do_ matter, for sure, but I think most today sorely misunderstand what they do and do not mean.

Theres another field riddles with crass incompetence, surveying.

Regards, NT

[N. Thornton]

Its not, because it is expense and time that isnt saving any lives. There are other uses for these resources that actually would save lives.

Our electrical safety standards are the highest and tightest in the world. Why has no other country followed our 'lead'? Are they all ignorant fools, or have they perhaps had a peek at the statistics?

Regards, NT

[Lurch]

On 22 May 2004 15:11:01 -0700, [e-mail] (N. Thornton) strung together this:

Quite true. It's like I've said before, as have others here, for some reason someone in an office, in a suit, who's never done a days manual labour in his life, has decided that if you are a member of a trade body you are good at what you do. If you are not, then you are incompetent. I personally have found it to be a completely random affair where I've come across plenty of people in the NICEIC who are downright clueless and dangerous, and I've also come across plenty of people who aren't members of any trade bodies and are extremely competent at what they do. The problem is that ideally a case by case, or person by person, competence check is needed, but there simply isn't the time or manpower, so a wider blanket ruling is placed and covered with red tape so no-one has a clue what's going on.

[Ian Stirling]

Staple-guns work just fine for clipping cabling. (if careful, and not for power stuff of course.) I made up a plant-label with a notch in it, and glued it to the front of the staple-gun to ensure adequate centering, and then adjusted the power so that it just gripped the cable. Nice and fast, and no fiddling about looking for cable clips. (it was just a temperature sensor wire, for the greenhouse)

[Pete C]

Hi,

Another one is to staple over a cable tie and use that to secure the cable, handy where there is not enough space to hammer in a cable clip.

cheers, Pete.

[Owain]

"Ian Stirling" wrote | Staple-guns work just fine for clipping cabling. | (if careful, and not for power stuff of course.)

However audio cables should be clipped at irregular intervals to prevent the formation of a standing wave.

Owain

[Mary Fisher]

I've been away this weekend and the consensus among the others trying to sell their wares was that we'd have been more successful if we'd been offering shoulder tattoos.

I wouldn't mind doing it to someone else but on myself ... no thanks. I don't like needles ...

Mary

[usenet]

As it turned out it was an error/oversight in his configuration and he was pleased to have been told. I could possibly have been a bit gentler about pointing it out though.

The RFCs and netiquette recommendations do have a purpose and while I'm not pedantic about them I do try and comply with them and do also ask others to if the ignore them consistently.