Hey everyone,
We have been renovating our house for the last year or two and are finally getting towards finishing (or so we thought!)
We have just had an electrician round to add a couple of sockets having had 'most' of the wiring redone last year by a different qualified electrician who replaced all sockets/replaced all lighting circuits with downlights, replaced consumer unit etc. We have full NIC EIC test certificates from the original electrician.
When adding the new sockets to the upstairs ring the new electrician said the earth to most sockets appears not to be connected (he has showed me this on his circuit tester). From what he can see in 4 places somewhere between sockets the earth wiring has become disconnected/broken hence there's no earth.
He has found the two sockets that have the the earth coming from the consumer unit, one of which is correctly connected to the consumer unit, one of which is not. Most of the wiring from the new consumer unit is using the old wiring (so they didn't replace it) however on one of the sockets that it runs to there is new wiring. As a result the new electrician said that they have obviously used a hidden junction box somewhere to join the old wiring and the new wiring. He said that this is against regulations as they have to be accessible.
I just wanted to confirm this would be a violation of the regs (as from reading on the internet there seems to be some debate as to what is 'accessible')
The original company were not very good but given it seems as though it's going to be reasonably expensive to fix it i want to get them to come and sort it out. I know they will make any excuses they can to cover themselves and i wanted to see if the hidden connection of old to new wiring was illegal so i have at least one claim against them? I'm sure they'll claim it happened after they left but it seems amazing that the connections for 4 different sections of hidden earth wiring has been damaged or disconnected within about a year of installation?
I would greatly appreciate your thoughts as we need to get this sorted asap and i want as much ammo as possible before going back to them as i know they are going to deny any problems.
Thanks so much,
Dave
We have been renovating our house for the last year or two and are finally getting towards finishing (or so we thought!)
We have just had an electrician round to add a couple of sockets having had 'most' of the wiring redone last year by a different qualified electrician who replaced all sockets/replaced all lighting circuits with downlights, replaced consumer unit etc. We have full NIC EIC test certificates from the original electrician.
When adding the new sockets to the upstairs ring the new electrician said the earth to most sockets appears not to be connected (he has showed me this on his circuit tester). From what he can see in 4 places somewhere between sockets the earth wiring has become disconnected/broken hence there's no earth.
He has found the two sockets that have the the earth coming from the consumer unit, one of which is correctly connected to the consumer unit, one of which is not. Most of the wiring from the new consumer unit is using the old wiring (so they didn't replace it) however on one of the sockets that it runs to there is new wiring. As a result the new electrician said that they have obviously used a hidden junction box somewhere to join the old wiring and the new wiring. He said that this is against regulations as they have to be accessible.
I just wanted to confirm this would be a violation of the regs (as from reading on the internet there seems to be some debate as to what is 'accessible')
The original company were not very good but given it seems as though it's going to be reasonably expensive to fix it i want to get them to come and sort it out. I know they will make any excuses they can to cover themselves and i wanted to see if the hidden connection of old to new wiring was illegal so i have at least one claim against them? I'm sure they'll claim it happened after they left but it seems amazing that the connections for 4 different sections of hidden earth wiring has been damaged or disconnected within about a year of installation?
I would greatly appreciate your thoughts as we need to get this sorted asap and i want as much ammo as possible before going back to them as i know they are going to deny any problems.
Thanks so much,
Dave