Advice Required On Bonding....

[mosaix]

Hi,

I've recently created a shower room and the electrics are being inspected in a couple of days.

There are five pipes entering the room, hot water, cold water, central heating flow and return and the shower cold feed from the header tank.

Because the floor has been tiled I've bonded the pipes under the landing floor just the other side of the shower room wall so it can be inspected. A gas pipe also runs by and I've bonded to that as well.

Two questions:

1) Because the shower cold feed comes down from the loft and not from under the floor I've bonded this to the shower hot feed immediately behind the shower partition wall and this has been tiled and so not available for inspection. Will this fail the inspection or will the inspector consider the pipe is effectively 'bonded' to the hot pipe by the shower control unit?

2) Do I need to bond the hot and cold pipes underneath the wash basin as well as bonding them under the floor?

Thanks in anticipation.

 

[davy_owen_88]

Electrical connections should always be accessible unless the connection is considered permanent (Crimped, soldered/brazed etc) but it is possible to test to confirm effective bonding - whether your inspector will consider this an acceptable substitute for actually seeing the connection is a question only the inspector can answer.

You do not need to bond pipes together repeatedly - if they are effectively linked and there are no insulating joints (plastic pushfit fittings etc) then once is sufficient.

P.S Do you have RCD protection for all circuits within the bathroom? Do you have main equipotential bonding to all your incoming services (water/gas/oil)? If you have both of these then supplementary bonding is not required within a bathroom at all.

 

[mosaix]

Davy - thanks for your reply.

The house is fairly old but whilst the wiring seems in good condition the light circuits have no earth so it must be fairly old as well.

When I first moved in I had an electrician check things over and he fitted an RCD next to the fuse box that covers all the circuits in the house.

There is only one circuit into the shower room - the light circuit. Because of the lack of an earth I have fitted double insulated lights. The only other electrical item in the room is an extractor fan connected to the lighting circuit via a two-pole switch.

There is equipotential bonding for the water but I'm not sure about the gas.

 

[holmslaw]

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