Is this any surprise ?

[SimonH2]

Are smart meters to blame for house fires? Fears families are being put at risk after evidence suggests some engineers installing the devices don't know what they are doing

Personally I'm not surprised - there's bound to be some problems, especially when they've had to recruit a lot of new technicians quickly. But then, I also don't rely on the Daily Fail for factual news

 

[winston1]

It was on Watchdog last week.

 

[SimonH2]

Yes, that other bastion of balanced reporting

 

[Lectrician]

It is all down to them wiggling tails and loosening them in the CU. Exactly what we do, but the other way around! Should we be testing meter tail tightness once we have done a CU swap!?!

 

[Echo the husky]

Don't you?

 

[John D v2.0]

To be honest if the L tail falls out of the cu and shorts to earth you're going to get a good bang. I doubt they do an ir test on the tails before energising. Polarity is done before and after as a live test.
For the gas supply to leak at the same time you have to be pretty unlucky, not sure what happened there.

 

[flameport]

For the gas supply to leak at the same time you have to be pretty unlucky, not sure what happened there.

Presumably fitting the smart gas meter at the same time and failed to tighten something properly. Or left the test point open etc.

 

[ericmark]

Even before smart meters there has been a problem with poorly cut threads on meter terminals, this has resulted in the torque wrench showing tight enough, but in real terms cables not clamped firmly in the terminal, we should have a closed terminal which requires opening to insert cables, that way we are sure the threads are good all the way down, with a device with terminals open we should close and open terminals first to ensure good threads, but human nature we don't.

The big problem is with a bad thread, once heated up and cooled down a few times, it will reform itself so after the event it is impossible to tell if left slack or if threads were binding, so it always goes down as human error even when it was faulty machining of the threads.