Why checking that the circuit is dead is so important.

[Dr Drew]

I was given a job to rewire a portacabins sockets, straight forward job replace 2.5mm2 twin+cpc radial with 4mm2.

As always follow safe isolation procedure, other electrician I am working with says 'why are you wasting your time doing that?'.

I test the socket under the ccu and its still live, so I remove the trunking lid and see the cable running from the socket to the mcb I have isolated, follow the cable to the other end at the other side of the cabin and to my suprise its terminated in another ccu.

'Thats why I'm wasting my time doing that'

 

[Jabbajaws]

I couldnt agree more....:hippy:

 

[pencilpusher]

Well done you. Stick to your morals as you did. I bet he felt a bit of a clown?

 

[Guitarist]

Well done. Are you sure he was a qualified electrician?

 

[PEG]

Fair play to you,thats NOT a story he will be repeating to anybody,lets hope it raised his game....

 

[needasparks]

Don't think many give it the importance its needed, we've all cut corners here and there to get the job done quickly, me included and every so offen you get the wake up call. My last one was a callout to a non-working immersion, I left it live, took all the covers to see where the power stopped. Got strange readings to earth so turned off and still all live. Turnes out someone fitted a new CU about a year before and not only fitted a 16th board butgot the tails mixed up and whole house was reversed polarity. Could have been a nasty supprise for someone.

 

[robsparky1975]

Good on you,i am the same and dont go out buying mft,calibration,and other testers to not bother do the most quick and simplest of things.besides getting a whack is not nice,learnt that years ago:cry_smile:

 

[Guest22]

All the electricians i work with respect with utmost "Testing for dead" but might because i work in a industrial setting, not sure if that changes things, i would think so.

 

[johnboy6083]

I've had a switch fuse assembled wrong, so that the neutral pole was inserted as the L1 pole. The poles aren't labelled either (socomec). I was working on a 3ph DB & switched the isolator off. I tested at the DB and noticed that the L1 was still live. I checked another and it was the same. I reported it up the chain, and it was an assembly fault.

 

[MarkieSparkie]

All the electricians i work with respect with utmost "Testing for dead" but might because i work in a industrial setting, not sure if that changes things, i would think so.

Electricians trained in industrial environment do seem to have a more healthy respect for testing dead and are less likely to cut corners than those trained in a domestic environment in my experience, probably because of their heightened sense of the potential consequences, which are likely to be more dramatic and life threatening.

 

[Dr Drew]

Well done. Are you sure he was a qualified electrician?

Sadly yes, he is amazing at installing, but not very good with the theory, when I was an apprentice he told me that you couldn't get a shock off a neutral, but I did.

 

[Guitarist]

Totally agree. The first few weeks of an industrial apprenticeship consist mainly of gruesome videos showing what can happen to people who "don't follow the rules". It's then a very rigid training regime. From the threads we get on here posted by some domestic apprentices who have been left to "get on with it", before being trained on exactly what to do, I'm surprised there aren't more accidents than there are. No offence to the really good domestic firms out there, but it does seem a much less formalised training system at times.

 

[Robotstar5]

I'm an industrial sparky and it's probably because we work on usually double the domestic voltage?

 

[Silly Sausage]

What's the problem here...

 

[telectrix]

yellow gloves are for the simpsons. but the simpsons only have 3 fingers each hand, so they won't fit.

 

[Silly Sausage]

Barsteward!
You'll cut yourself one day.

 

[Guest22]

Probably the higher voltage and the fact of far more circuits from far more DBs so increased chance of things being fed from multiple locations! I`ve yet to have a jolt of 415!!

 

[Guitarist]

When you have to fault-find in cabinets the length of a house, with at least four different voltages present, you learn to be very careful.....