A different world - heath and safety nuts look away.

Last week I went to Moldova doing some work with a charity on people's houses. Nothing electrical, mainly painting, fitting false ceilings, rendering etc.

But I though you might like some of the things I saw..!


The local village substation. You can walk up and poke it. During high winds the cables strung between the poles along the roads bounce around and short against each other.


Standard Electric Meter - the blue cable brings power in, the black into the house. There is a dual pole 100A MCB in there and that's it. No other fuses or anything for the house. No earth used. All the houses are like this (and this is a good one!)


A real bird's nest of wires! There's a connection under there somewhere.


Yep, those are bare connections to this lamp and the associated switch. They were above a door, about eight feet up.


This guy was the son of one of the elderly ladies whose house we worked on. He was a nightmare. In the first photo, he's using an axe to chop a live wire (for a socket) out of the wall it had been plastered into and yes, he's holding the wire.

In the second, he insisted on extending the light switch wire and the wire to the ceiling rose himself as we fitted the new false ceiling, despite me offering to do it. He turned the power off and pulled all the connections out of the box, then turned the power on again and carried on working. The circled wires are live and bare. I left at that point until he'd finished.

One of the Moldovan guys got a belt off a cable buried in the ceiling, thankfully nothing serious. We'd traced the lighting wires, but there was an old redundant cable going across that we didn't know about. The guy now has my detector pen so he has some chance of not doing it again.

I'm not posting this to poke fun at or mock the Moldovans, it's just how it is out there. Maybe one day things will change.