It was Christmas Eve morning....

[whinmoor]

Here’s a little story which links nicely to a thread in the main forum: http://www.electriciansforums.co.uk...lar-panel-circuit-mcb-size-4.html#post1051091

It was Christmas Eve morning and I was all packed ready to go to visit the family down south. My mobile rang and I saw that it was a customer so I decided to answer.

We had fitted 16 panels (split 10/6) a couple of months previously (in conjunction with a complete re-roof). There was a P1 in the loft as the only viable alternative was putting the inverter outside.

The customer told me his system wasn’t working. The inverter had an error message: “Missing Grid” on the screen.

Fortunately, he lived reasonably close so I decided to visit. The panel voltages were fine and rebooting the inverter showed the same error message. The AC voltage downstairs read 244v but we only had 190v upstairs. There was no visible fault and the terminations were all correct.

It turned out that after we had fitted our system he had had a new gas boiler installed. For some reason, the boiler fitter had drilled a hole about an inch away from our SWA and managed to mangle our cable. There were two holes on the outside but the two cables came through together. When we pulled our cable from the wall for inspection, it sparked. We couldn’t understand why the boiler guy couldn’t have drilled through a brick or two lower.

In this property the gas meter is in the same cupboard as the CU and electric meter. The customer told me that he had needed to call the boiler company back due to a strong smell of gas in his pantry. So, he had a gas leak and a damaged and potentially sparking cable within a couple of feet of each other. A recipe for disaster.

The boiler company is one of the biggies with dozens of engineers so the householder has lodged an official complaint which is ongoing. He’s going to need compensation for loss of FiT and we are looking at a claim for repairing the damage as well. He’s also considering a complaint to the Gas Safe Register.

(And this wasn't DIY Dave, it was a "professional" Gas Safe listed engineer).

 

[Gavin A]

what a muppet.

strange that it didn't trip the MCB

 

[SolarCity]

The gas fitter ran the twin and earth? Like you, I am baffled as to why someone would drill so close to another cable.

 

[whinmoor]

To update this, we had an investigator from Gas Safe visiting today. A representative of the boiler installation company also attended. It turned out that there had actually been two gas leaks and Northern Gas Networks had visited twice to make the property safe.

They didn't dispute that they their workman had damaged our cable and offered to replace it by running T+E in a plastic conduit. I rejected that suggestion as we prefer SWA and we didn't want to be associated with their workmanship. I said that if their guy did the work, we couldn't honour our PV warranty. The householder also seemed to prefer us doing the remedial work as well.

The boiler guy then rejected our fee for replacing the cable. I think the hardware will cost less than £30 (10m of SWA and glands). The real issue is time. How much would you charge for:

3 hours on Xmas Eve attending & identifying the fault
1 hour today attending the inspection
2 hours to make the repairs and re-commission the system (not yet done)

Plus, maybe 3-4 hours on admin relating to this issue: writing reports, emailing photos, making phone calls, being on hold at the call centre, waiting (in vain) for calls to be returned, etc.

 

[telectrix]

at least £400.

 

[Gavin A]

have you got a standard charging schedule for remedials etc? if so use that.

double time christmas eve, so maybe £150-200 call out, £75 call out today, £50 admin, £75 repairs plus materials so yeah at least £400