Ring Main
Posted: Thu 19 February, 2009 Filed under: General 2 Comments »Yesterday, we had the electrician out again to the house to install some lights and new plug sockets in the kitchen.
As part of that work, he discovered that the house’s ring-main for the electrics was actually not a ring-main at all, in that it wasn’t a complete circle.
I don’t profess to understand the details of ring-mains etc. – that’s why we have an electrician to do these things – but it’s also something that the previous electrician we had really should have checked at the same time we had all the other work done. Only he didn’t, because he was an idiotic cock-end.
So we’ve not had a proper ring-main for the last two years. Fortunately we don’t run anything that could’ve buggered the wiring or caused a problem – but all the same, the house is noticeably safer on that score now than it was on Monday, for example.
We’ve had a mixture of luck with electricians – the guy we now use is fantastic, and was recommended by the builder. The previous bunch of clowns we used were a nightmare – we’ve since found a number of things that should’ve been done when they were here, but that weren’t.
And as always, it’s worth noting that we tell lots of people about the electricians to avoid, then recommend the one we like…
Did you by any chance buy your house off an electrician? Turns out a previous owner of our house was a plumber, and he set about re-plumbing the house in his spare time with pipes & bits left over from other jobs. When we got our plumber in to look at problems with our storage tank, he was astounded by what he saw. We’ve opened a corgi-unregistered can of worms that I sometimes wish we hadn’t touched…
No, we got ours from an old fucker who liked to think he could do DIY.
As with you, he seems to have bodged every job he ever did – the list is endless – and we now tell any workmen to add at least one day to the quote, just because there’ll be surprises they haven’t expected.
The current worst example is that the old bastard installed the thermostat (and the rest of the heating system) in such a way that the plumber who installed the new one quoted for one day’s work to install it, and it took him four. The final diagnosis?
(I’ve probably got the letters wrong, but that’s the gist of it)