Why not the same for sparks

[onlyfitidealboilers]

helllo guys

why dont sparks have to resit all there exams again every 5 years like the gas lads, electric is as dangrous as gas, an also have to be registerd with a body like gas safe before being allowed loose on electrics, corgi made a big diffrence when that started 15 years ago prices went up an so did the gas industry as a hole just a thought

 

[ELZ4742]

because monkeys have the attention span of 5 years?

 

[onlyfitidealboilers]

very good.. just thought it would help the sparks, seen as joiners are ahead of you now in the pay scale!!

 

[PrinceofDarkness]

I wonder if they have ESOL courses in Aberdeen?

Lucia.

 

[innocentman]

very good.. just thought it would help the sparks, seen as joiners are ahead of you now in the pay scale!!

Trouble is NIC etc all have 5 day wonder sparks registered with them ..... these are the guys who train and qualify in 5 days..... no experience, no idea, no clue.
A lot of people will try to do electrics themselves, if you bugger up a bit of wiring..... who knows, they just say..... its fine, it works etc
If a joiner buggers up a door, it won't shut etc and everyone will see it so they will pay for a tradesman.
Decent sparks DO upgrade their qualifications everynow and then I've been back to college 5 times in under 20 yrs to do new regulation courses, inspection and testing courses etc etc.

Trouble is, every man and his dog can go to a big shed and buy enough gear to wire a house, once its plastered.... who knows where the runs are !!

 

[dingbat]

Trouble is NIC etc all have 5 day wonder sparks registered with them ..... these are the guys who train and qualify in 5 days..... no experience, no idea, no clue.

And your evidence for this widely-believed nonsense?

 

[ban-all-sheds]

electric is as dangrous as gas

No it isn't.

 

[PrinceofDarkness]

'electric' can sometimes be as dangerous as gas - take the recent incident in Berkshire where a dwelling house had a gas leak which was ignited by the operation of a light switch: The resulting Boom! took out the side of the house, shattered windows of neighbouring properties and was heard as far afield as Barnsley (which isn't in Berkshire).

Clearly an 'electrical fault'........


Lucia.

 

[flameport]

Although gas doesn't kill many people, if there is a gas leak, and a whole row of houses blows up, it is national news.
Electricity doesn't kill many people either, and if someone gets a shock from faulty wiring, almost no one will know, it probably won't even be reported to anyone, and even in the very unlikely event someone dies, it still doesn't have the same impact as a huge crater where a street once was.

Thanks to advertising/propaganda from Corgi and others, most people believe that gas is very dangerous and doing anything with it themselves must be illegal (although that is not actually true).
No equivalent exists for electricity, since a substantial amount of domestic electrical work is not notifiable, and even for the work which is, membership of any scheme is not mandatory, and there are several competing schemes which just confuses the general public.

Many people are willing to have a go themselves when replacing lights or whatever, believing it to be a very simple task which couldn't possibly go wrong. (This forum is ample evidence that many people do get it wrong).
There is also the 'it works, so must be ok' mentality, which unfortunately leads people to believe that they actually know what they are doing, even though the work they have completed is shoddy and dangerous.
This isn't helped by dubious providers offering courses so that kitchen fitters (which is not even a proper trade) can do notifiable electrical work themselves after just 5 days training and a multiple guess exam.

 

[skenk]

We should be paying a 'federation' type scheme representative of it's members' interests instead of essentially being a customer of the self effaciating private schemes who just look for more influence and ways to make money out of their 'members' and anyone else. I admit they probably act in electricians' interests too and help to raise standards but a lot more could be done. Every member should have a vote on the people running the show!

As many will testify the current schemes do not prevent bad electricians from becoming registered and carrying out dodgy installs. Scheme membership is not compulsory up here (in Scotland) which has it's own problems but neither system seems adequate to me.

With gas at least there is only one scheme so the public are more aware of the need to use the proper registered person. Unfortunately the CORGI brand was built up to widespread public awareness, now people need to be convinced that it is no longer necessary to be CORGI but it is Gas Safe Register instead . . . To top the confusion off, CORGI still exists as some kind of 'home service' (insurance?) outfit which includes gas work . . . what a joke. I know GSR came in a while back but the way the system for both gas and electric is run here is seems to me to be pi55 poor.

I wonder how it works in other countries? I'm pretty sure in the USA (Illinois) the electricians are unionised and command a decent minimum rate, I was told it was 'illegal' to pay an electrician less, under any arrangement (shifts, contract etc).

 

[ban-all-sheds]

And your evidence for this widely-believed nonsense?

It is not nonsense.

What % of their rolls are 5-day wonders IHNI, but the following are true:

• It is possible to obtain the EAL DI qualification in 5 days, and in terms of qualifications that is enough to register with NICEIC.
• The examples of work needed to register are not onerous, and can include things done on your own house.
• The testing competence you need to demonstrate is all about installation work.
• It is quite realistic for someone to become a "registered electrician" and put themselves out there in the market:
  - without ever having rewired a house or have acquired any of the practical skills needed to do it.
  - without ever having seen or practiced with SWA.
  - without ever having seen or practiced with MICC.
  - without ever having seen or heard of intermediate light switches.
  - without ever having done any fault-finding.
  - without ever having had any training whatsoever in design.
  - without, in fact, ever having actually done anything apart from the few little jobs put forward for assessment.

Look at the examples we've had here in just the last couple of days:

An "electrician" who thinks that because 2.5mm² cable complies in a given circuit 4mm² will be non-compliant.
An "electrician" who thinks that a surface clipped cable needs RCD protection because it isn't buried >50mm deep.
An "electrician" who can't sort out an external lighting circuit because it's done in MICC.


"No experience, no idea, no clue"? - Spot on.

 

[dingbat]

The nonsense, BAS, as you well know, is the widely-perceived notion, held by time-served electricians, that all the bad work is carried out by people who have done nothing more than taken a five day course and have suddenly started trading as 'electricians'.

The truth is that it only takes a simple qualification to be allowed to apply for registration and that this was introduced because a large proportion of people were already carrying out electrical work in dwellings with little understanding. Some of these people have increased their knowledge, and - to the chagrin of electricians - have legitimised their operations by becoming registered. (Others have actually stopped carrying out electrical work.)

The nonsense is that non-electricians - willing to be trained, willing to be registered and assessed - are incapable of doing a good job, while electricians are always perfect.

I don't dispute your list of quite legitimate assertions. What I do dispute is that there are legions of so-called 5-day wonders suddenly trading as 'electricians' because, as many have discovered recently, there is little financial incentive to trade solely as a domestic electrician.

I concede that it is entirely possible that there are some people out there who were accountants or IT workers six months ago and are suddenly registered to carry out domestic electrical work and describe themselves as 'electrician', but I don't see much evidence that this is rife. Most of those registered have done so in order to maintain their own, pre-existing trade.

So when it comes to:

"No experience, no idea, no clue"?

that applies as much to some of those who describe themselves as qualified electricians.

The truth is that there is and always will be sub-standard work, carried out willfully or in ignorance by people insufficiently aware of their responsibilities or the dangers, regardless of how they have obtained any qualifications. I genuinely do not accept that this has only happened since January 2005 and to tar those who have voluntarily put themselves up for training and assessment with the same brush as those who routinely carry out appalling work with no regard for the safety of their clients is just a lazy convenience for 'proper' electricians looking for someone to blame.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

The nonsense, BAS, as you well know, is the widely-perceived notion, held by time-served electricians, that all the bad work is carried out by people who have done nothing more than taken a five day course and have suddenly started trading as 'electricians'.

But that notion was not the one you criticised - the criticism of yours to which I responded was this:

Trouble is NIC etc all have 5 day wonder sparks registered with them ..... these are the guys who train and qualify in 5 days..... no experience, no idea, no clue.

And your evidence for this widely-believed nonsense?

Trouble is NIC etc all have 5 day wonder sparks registered with them .....

They do all have "5-day wonder" people registered with them, so it is not nonsense to say that they do.

these are the guys who train and qualify in 5 days.....

It is possible to train and qualify, as in come out of a commercial sausage machine carrying a certificate which says you are a qualified Domestic Installer in 5 days, so it is not nonsense to say that it is.

no experience, no idea, no clue

That is also demonstrably true - someone who has gone through such training does not come out with experience and does not come out with any ideas or clues on how to be a competent domestic installer. It doesn't matter how good they also are at plumbing, kitchen fitting, joinery, landscape gardening etc, they will not come out with the practical skills needed to rewire houses without unnecessary mess and damage, they will not come out with the ability to do fault finding, they will not come out with any ideas on how to design installations, they will not come out with the ability to install or repair all the types of cable they will encounter. So it is not nonsense to say that they won't.

I did not say that it is only such people who carry out bad work, I did not say that all such people carry out bad work, I did not make any statements concerning how many such people are trading as electricians and I did not say that it is necessarily a bad thing that kitchen fitter, plumbers etc should have electrical training.

I said that this:

Trouble is NIC etc all have 5 day wonder sparks registered with them ..... these are the guys who train and qualify in 5 days..... no experience, no idea, no clue.

is not nonsense.

And it is not.

 

[bernardgreen]

First I am an electronics design engineer and not a qualified electrician. I have self built a house and carried out all the elecrical and gas installations. The gas work was inspected and pressure tested by the gas board before the meter was connected. That was legal at the time.

I am often appalled by the electrical work carried out by electricians who are or claim to be trained and qualified. Common sense and /or basic knowledge proves it is un-satisfactory and / or potential dangerous.

Both in domestic work and industrial sites.

I am also becoming more and more concerned about blind obeyance of some recent rules which results in an installation with higher risks of problems in the future. Things are getting better but there are some circumstances where more recent recommendations are not applicable but are applied "because they are the latest".

Gas and electricity and their dangers.

Defective gas installations are general far more dangerous than defective electrical installations in terms of the end result. gas leaks kill or destroy without warning. Fumes from incorrected installed or ajusted burners kill without warning. Electrical leaks can kill outright but most often provide a severe fright and possibly the supply is cut of by the protective devices. ( RCB and /or MCB or fuse ) There are no protective devices that can be sensibly fitted to automatically shut of a domestic gas supply in the event of a leak. So installation of gas work has to be more strictly controlled and monitored.

The dangers from mis use of an appliance are different. More electrical appliances cause damage through mis-use than gas appliances do. ( I don't have a definitive source for that information ).

 

[plugwash]

The dangers from mis use of an appliance are different. More electrical appliances cause damage through mis-use than gas appliances do. ( I don't have a definitive source for that information ).

But i'd think that is at least partly because we have fewer gas appliances than electric ones and the gas ones we do have are mostly fixed appliances often on regular service/inspection contracts while electrical appliances in a domestic situation are almost never inspected (and even in commerical situations pat testing is often not done as often as it should be).

And the few portable gas things we do have (e,g, bunsen burners, blowtorches etc) are very obviously dangerous and to be handled with care.