The Lamp Room

You may remember the house my parents have let off that I was going on about the state of. Well since the kitchen was trashed me and dad ripped it out ready for a new one. Ripping it out revealed all sorts of delights hidden behind the mid 90's chipboard. The first one was that a socket had been moved to accomodate the units and to do so the wall had been chased out at 45degrees!. The second was the washing machine socket. This was mounted in one of the cupboards with about 4' of T+E coiled under the unit before going up the wall at about 80degrees into a fuse spur that was beind the cupbaord, this fuse spur goes to the garage and is on it's own MCB but the socket sprouting from it was on the socket MCB, the fridge socket was mounted the same but directly to the socket circuit.
After this came the tile removing, so the sockets were turned off and pulled forward. The ones on the left went out along with the pelmet lights (fed of fuse spur with 3A fuse) but the one on the right and the under-unit lights stayed on! Turned out they were on the garage circuit from the CU with no ID at all. I pulled 13A fuse out of the spur for the under unit lights the other year as that's what had been fitted (presumablly by the kitchent fitter).
Anyway I knew the chasing was non-complient but the sockets were getting shady for my knowledge and I knew something was not right so in-comes my dad's mate who is a retired spark but still has all the equipment. Turns out there was spurs on spurs and it needs re-doing. (House is only mid 1980s) so expect this was all done when the kitchen was fitted in the mid 1990's.
So ordinary mortals like me can't legally do kitchen electrics but a kitchen fitter can!

How much is a part-p course these days? I bet half the "pro's" working aren't!

It will probably be the kitchen ring that needs a part rewire find the 2 ends then just recomplete the ring to each point

I won't tell you what I think of kitchen fitters electrics..... I've sorted enough of their bodges out!

I wasn't there today but by the sounds of it they are picking the ring main up up-stairs where it runs through floor doing the bedroom sockets and bassicaly dropping it down to the kitchen socket so they are in the ring, re-doing the wonky chasing and getting the garage supply on its own.

When my mum had her kitchen fitted, these same people wired the socket fronts and then pulled the cable tight up the wall, and then plastered it.
This wouldn`t have been so bad, but they must have tightened the terminals up with an `electrical` screwdriver, (one of them 2mm wide ones)!
As a result the wires came loose so you could just hear them arcing, but, yes, you guessed it......, you couldn`t get the socket front back off as the cable had been pulled up the wall, then plastered in!

What did you do in the end?

I had to break the socket front up with pliers so I could get to the terminals, then put the wires in a block at the back of the box, with 3 pieces of 2.5 singles from the block to the new socket!
It was a really poor install, if they had tightened the wires properly in the first place, it would have been ok, but they didn`t even get that right!

Not a kitchen fitter but quite sure this was done by some of the unskilled staff where these came from...

This is the wiring on some of the Fitzy Lightpack's I acquired recently, on this one there's <2mm clearance between the exposed copper on the line and earth cores, and there was no earth supplied to the fitting due it being bodged onto the black 2-core flex!

Also a few of the fixtures had line, neutral and/or earth cores pulled out of the connections in the fittings (this may have been done when they were removed).

It's frustrating to see people try to do electrical work without having a clue what they're doing thus leaving a dangerous mess behind

*SHUDDERS*