Pull switch in the outside loo was a bit sticky. Had a spare so decided to change it. Switched off the ground floor lights MCB and did so. The ceiling low enough at that point not to need a step ladder. Used my normal insulated shaft electrical screwdriver.
After finishing, checked it switched easily. And the light came on.
It was actually on the outside lights circuit.
Bet if I'd known it was live and had to work on it I'd have got a belt. ;-) Although it is on the RCD side of the CU.
Next time you'll probably remember to switch the light on, then switch the MCB off and see that the light goes out!
And yes, I'm sure we've all made the same mistake.
Because of the way this house was built and added to, I have a couple of
13A outlets downstairs fed from the upstairs ring. They are labelled accordingly.
The ultimate gotcha, and I had the electric shock and RCD trip to prove it, is Philips Hue bulbs. They can be turned off via the app even when the supply to them is live. I was changing lots of GU10 sockets, which required rewiring each one. I'd been ever so goo about turning off the wall switch
*and the lighting circuit MCB* each time I did a batch. And then my wife said "Can you do that one as well". The lights were off, so I thought that the wall switch "must" be off. It wasn't. The RCD tripped so fast that the shock that I got was nowhere near as bad as ones I;ve had in the past, in the days before RCDs. Just as well: my heart might be less able to withstand a bad shock than it used to be, since I had a heart attack and cardiac arrest 10 years ago...
Thank goodness for an RCD! The *only* way is to turn off the MCB (or pull the fuse in very old properties). You can't trust any home electrician to wire things up correctly, I'm afraid. I'm sure there are more than a few who have live fed to the bulb, then to the switch, then to neutral. I've got a couple of Quinetic wall light switches, and although they are very good, I'm not sure I'd trust only them if I had to work on the circuit they control. Have they /really/ switched off the power, or could the switch and/or the receiver be faulty?
If you are paranoid, you even padlock the MCB switch. My mum had a friend whose toddler son was a "little monkey", just as I had been a few years earlier. Whereas I had changed the tension on the friend's sewing machine, poured her saltpot into the sugar bowl and spli the perfume onto the varnished top of her dressing table, her son managed to very nearly electrocute the electrician. He had turned off the fuse box switch before he started work, but Mark "helpfully" turned it back on. :-( As an encore he then jammed a stick into the "agitator" of her twin-tub washing machine and nearly set fire to it.
Electricians have a 'proving dead' procedure, that uses a proving unit which is a voltage detector that has its own voltage source generated from a battery. You put the probe on the voltage source to check it's working correctly, then you check the circuit under test, then you put the probe on the voltage source again to confirm the unit didn't break in the meantime.
I don't have such a unit but used ones on ebay aren't too expensive and might be a useful investment. As it is I do something similar with a (good) multimeter, but the proving unit takes away any risk of making mistakes.
Theo
There comes a time when you test a frequently as possible, but there is still the possibility that someone will unknowingly and "helpfully" turn on a circuit that appears to have tripped, in the time since you last checked.
Whenever I use a screwdriver with a neon that shows whether a circuit is live, I always test it on a known-live circuit first. Likewise for a cable detector that can be used to trace the route of a cable buried in plaster. I bought one of those from a certain two-letter-and-ampersand DIY shop, and it is utterly useless. It often fails to go off even when held next to a live cable or mains plug, and yet at other times it sounds when it's a long way from a cable. Can't rely on it to tell me anything ;-)
My mum's friend had a good (friendly) moan about the various pranks and meddlings I'd done whenever I'd gone to her house. Mum said to her "You wait till you have one". And sure enough a few years later her son was just the same. They had a good laugh about it.
But at least it was just "naughty". You then get the kids, like my very first "friend" when I was at playgroup (pre-school as today's children would call it). I say "friend" in inverted commas because it was one of those classic cases where the mothers become friends and so the children will (under pain of death) become friends as well. That lad, Derek, was pure evil. He took my soap-on-a-rope (remember those?) that I'd just been given for my birthday, and flushed it down the loo. And he took my "doll" that I used to cuddle when I went to bed (I *was* only little!) and shoved it up the chimney so it ended up covered in soot. And he wrote a "rude word" (*) on my bedroom wall with mum's lipstick. And in each case he said to the grown-ups that he'd seen me do it - "Mummy, come see what he's done". The fact that he boasted gleefully about it shows that he *knew* he was doing wrong, rather than just fiddling with unexpected consequences as I did with the perfume bottle, the salt pot and the tempting "I wonder what happens if I turn this" knob on the sewing machine.
(*) Mum and Dad would never tell me what had been written, even when I asked them a lot later, but said they were shocked that a 3-year-old boy knew such a word, so it must have been bad - maybe the F word or the C word. Maybe with a picture of the offending C-word. The wallpaper was washable (essential in a child's bedroom, in case they scribble on the wall) and by the time they let me back in the room, I couldn't see what had been written there - though I confess that I looked very hard ;-)
My younger brother and I were right little bastards.
Most of the problem was that when we went somewhere our Mother would give us a long list of things we were not allowed to do and give us a good hiding if we did any of them.
Now this was in our view a "serving suggestion" as we had not thought about half the things she said we could not do.
That time we locked our parents out the car (Ford Cortina) overnight in Lichfield and refused to unlock the car door was my brothers idea.
LOL. The thought had occurred to me as I read the previous paragraph, before I got to your "serving suggestion" paragraph, that listing what you must not do was putting ideas into your head.
Of course it was. You were totally and utterly innocent and blameless of it, and even tried to talk him out of it ;-)
Since there were only about three different Cortina keys, I imagine you parents only had to borrow a key from another Cortina owner to stand a good chance of being able to get in. Had your parents left their keys in the car with you, or had you managed to lock the car in such a way that even the keys couldn't unlock it?
It was surprising how long parents would leave their children in the car while they went somewhere - shopping, meeting a friend, going for a "quick pint" (like hell was it only one!) in the pub.
That's why locking devices for breakers exist. Once off, lock it off to prevent somebody turning it back on again. Keep the key in your pocket so the higher grade of idiot doesn't try to unlock it.
Those things aren't very reliable. The neon screwdrivers depend on having a suitable leakage path to earth, which depends on your skin resistance, footwear and flooring. While they can demonstrate presence of voltage, they can't demonstrate absence of voltage. So they aren't safe to use for proving dead.
Theo
When our eldest son was in nursery, we arrived to collect him, only to be called into the office and for the manager to apologise to us. One of the children (3 or 4 years old) had told another to f*ck off, only for another to say that he was saying it wrong and telling him how it should be pronounced. This rapidly escalated to all 14 children chanting it!
Luckily, we'd been quite careful of our own language, so it wasn't something our son already knew and just telling him that he mustn't repeat it worked.
My wife is from an Irish background (the accent comes out with a few phrases or when she's tired) and did pass a more innocuous term (from repeated comments to events while driving), to our middle son, at a younger age. He had Thomas in one hand and Percy (which he couldn't pronounce) in the other and ran them into each other, saying "They're coming down the track. Thomas is coming and Pissy. It's Thomas and Pissy, they're coming. Oh, Jaysus, they've crashed."
When a Cortina blocked my car in (I was in a legitimate space and he was not) and I had a limited time to get to the bank and back, I found a bit of the plastic band used on palleted loads, folded it in two, slid it between the door seal and the door, pushed one side further so that it curved and opened a loop, hooked it over the lock button and pulled.
I then rolled the car out of my way, left it at a stupid angle, re-locked it and left.
And when multiple people are working there, you use a lock-off device that can take multiple padlocks and everyone keeps their own key.
They're not too bad if you test the circuit that you are going to work on, isolate and test again, as the conditions will be identical. They are however, still banned from site-works.
We've had this discussion before. If you get to know their characteristics they're better than nothing.
Anyhow, to check a circuit is dead I short live to earth and neutral. Of course with RCBOs you can turn a circuit of remotely without affecting any other circuit.
On 13/06/2022 19:19, Rod Speed wrote:
Extract from 'Don't Cross the North Road' W. Wright (Kindle)
Wilfred had to marry Minnie quite a bit sooner than planned. For the wedding I was thoroughly scrubbed, dressed in my best, and severely warned. The ceremony seemed to me to take about five hours, then the bride and groom went into the vestry with the vicar. Unaware as I was of Minnie’s delicate condition, it suddenly all clicked! They had gone in there to have sex with the vicar supervising, so that they could have lots of babies later when they felt like it. Yes! Everything fell into place! I visualised the couple horizontal with the vicar standing over them chanting a prayer as they did the deed. My hazy knowledge of human reproduction had come about partly because dad’s wartime medical books didn’t deal with it, being more focussed on missing limbs and gross facial disfigurement. Harry Brown’s big brother was just back from National Service in Egypt, and the smudgy black-and-white photographs that Harry had swiped from under his mattress gave few clues; in fact you couldn’t really work out which body parts belonged to which person, and in some cases even what body parts were or for that matter to what purpose they were being employed. But anyway, I had been told that as soon as Wilfred and Minnie were married I must respectfully address her as ‘Auntie’, not just ‘Minnie’. Outside the church as the photographs were being taken, I said to Minnie, in a loud, penetrating, and knowledgeable voice, “Well you’ve had the sex Auntie Minnie, so when are you having the first baby?” On the short journey to the reception Mam and Dad didn’t seem to want to chat, and my happy gabbling was ignored. Very odd I thought. Sex education, until I reached Class 4B (see later), was nonexistent. There was no way that working class parents or school would provide any clues. Questions would most likely be met with an embarrassed silence, a stern rebuff, or even a clip round the lughole. Thus we had a confusing mix of truths, half-truths, and total misapprehensions. It’s a basic human characteristic to fill in knowledge gaps with supposition and then upgrade the supposition to hard fact. Thus mankind has religion and thus we kids believed all sorts of nonsense about sexual reproduction.
Bill
There was a particularly ugly woman who lived near us and who had three children. Local folklore was that they must be triplets - on the grounds that surely her husband can't have f***ed her more than once!
Then on again, just to check that the lamp hasn't failed while you're not looking.
Doesn't always work. Killed ring main (used a radio in the socket to check, off - on -off), blew a chunk out of screwdriver. Back to CU, closer look, neat wiring, all MCBs and input swapped L and N, so all the MCBs switched the neutral. I told the GF, not interested. Left her to it.
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