Search results

I'm painting new timber (no idea what, probably pine, it's full of knots) and MDF cupboard doors in a bathroom. Plus a mostly sanded back to the wood main door frame and mouldings, and a new cheap door similarly full of knots in the edges. If I'm using Zinsser BIN to prime, do I still need to...

Thank you @flameport I'll do that this weekend when I get chance to look at it again.

I'll get onto that tomorrow or Saturday. I need to have a closer look myself anyway. Hmm... I need to put that clamp meter to work!

Thank you for the reply. My current thinking is they've 'borrowed' something from another circuit entirely, so yes, testing is needed to find out where. The previous owners stuffed everything up here so much it's unbelievable; electrics, plumbing, plaster, structure... you name it, they broke it...

Here's the situation: I have (had) upstairs and downstairs lighting on separate circuits with 6A/30mA RCBOs. When I turned on the landing light (which is wired into the downstairs circuit) from ether hallway or landing switch, the downstairs RCBO trips. It also trips if I turn on the kitchen...

Yeah, the joys of old (and randomly 'improved') wiring. When I was 14 (early 80's) I part rewired my parents' huge kitchen. I was just fitting them an extra socket, but discovered by accident that turning on/off the fluorescent lights in the kitchen caused them to flicker on briefly every time...

Yep - if I ever get my hands on the people who DIY wrecked this house I'll strangle them with that cable. This issue is, believe it or not, completely trivial compared to some of the stuff I've found out they've done, and hidden. Two days after moving into the house (which we paid for the most...

I recently found that our side building is partly wired in 1960's VIR cable (which has no integrated earth continuity), embedded into the cement ceiling and render. The scum who owned the house previously did the trick of replacing the old cable with new where it could be seen, but then hiding...

We have a toilet in an out-building on the side of the house that we want rid of. See picture. Has anyone done similar and has advice please? The floor is concrete, with the tiny toilet room in the middle of the whole outbuilding. It looks like the toilet is cemented to the floor (probably...

Our gable end has an inactive (as far as I can tell) crack in the gable end. It's a bit of an odd construction... There are single-story 'outbuildings' with a flat, concrete roof on the side of the house; that roof is embedded into the gable wall half way up it. I think it is just embedded into...

Tell me about it o_O Even I've forgotten what I asked... Bits of the thread have been interesting though... I was thinking about making myself a little kWh meter to check things out around here and see where I can save a few quid. The cheap ones in the shops always seem to get bad reviews for...

LOL - yeah, what Iggifer said! I have to agree about old kit being cool. It's not long ago that I finally let go of my old AVO valve tester (the big, black bakelite one) and Frankenstein-style open knife switches. Not to mention the racks of hand-made core storage... just don't have room for...

It is in place; the earth is bonded to the supply's metal pipe/armour that comes up from the ground at the bottom of my picture. There is a second earth connection in the outbuildings (sort of built onto the side of the house) where the mains water pipe comes in, from that to the metal conduits...

Regarding the five vs. six wires into the meter, which I admit I only noticed myself when I took that picture... I would guess that the meter's current winding is in series with the supply live wire, and hence needs two tails, in and out. The voltage coil needs a live and neutral and is in...

Thank you all for the replies. 'shoddy' is too kind a word for the state some of this place is in; wiring and other aspects. I've always found it hard to believe, in the houses we've lived in, the state people leave the wiring in. I'm no professional (well, I'm an electronics engineer) but I...

The meter in our house has two set of tails coming from the consumer side of it (got worried when I first saw it until I ascertained they both came from that side). The two sets of tails actually connect into the meter itself; not through a junction box. One set goes to the main CU, the other...

Actually that was what confused me at first when I started researching this; figuring out exactly what was meant by a 'new circuit'. Reading a lot here helped though and it didn't take long to understand that it basically meant 'from the CU'.

Ahh... I've just found and read the 2015 update. Good heads-up, thank you! I had come across the requirement for buried cables but not just for the sockets regardless of the cabling. I'm thinking that, if I use RCD FCUs to spur off, it's still not notifiable since I'm not changing anything in...

Thanks for the comments folks. The flue could only be used by rebuilding the fireplace, relining (or piping) the flue and uncapping it. It would be impossible not to notice the socket doing that. Point well taken though. There are no RCDs in the CU - it's old (black/red wiring old and then...

Great, thank you Flameport!