You'd be surprised how many things we pick up on when we carry out EICRs.
This is one of very many non-compliances, all of varying strands of non-conformances, different causes, and different levels of un-saftiness.
This particular photo exhibits a piece of flex for a wall heater that had been recently installed - and we'd argue quite fiercely they were either in a big hurry, or were way too inexperienced to be doing this unsupervised (read: they don't usually do electrics)
What we have is the supply lead that has been put into the back of an isolator, but the inner core wasn't exposed far enough for the device, and instead of screwing into a nice clean copper core, instead the terminal had clamped down on the insulation. To varying degrees, the device was actually with the copper conductors, but by nowhere near enough.
Lets explore the issue of what we see here a bit further.
On the face of it, we'd expect the heater to probably be intermittent and potentially exhibit sparking and arcing inside the isolator, causing lots of heat and making the isolator fail prematurely due to burning out. That's if it worked at all. And if the isolator survived for long enough, if there was any electronics inside the heater, they would have likely failed prematurely, instead. Electronics don't particular like unstable power supplies.
We could have easily had a situation where the insulation on the line (live) and neutrals had been pierced, so the heater operates correctly, but the earth could have still been completely insulated and no-one would have known any better that the heater hadn't been technically earthed.
But there's more. Very technical sciency jargon as depicted in the regulations state that a certain level of good connection is essential, to make sure that the breaker trips quick enough to save the wiring from overheating. This level of good connection has easily surpassed. Very easily.
This is more of an informative article about what we found here, rather than an installation we had put in ourselves, to highlight some of things that could have gone wrong here, but also to remind our clients that they want to be choosing good quality electricians to carry out even the simplest of tasks.
To find out more about our quality health checks on electrics (EICRs), click here.
To find out what else we've been up to for your neighbours in Rochester, click here.
