To all those fans of moulded plugs!

[securespark]

Went to a house today where nearly all of the non-moulded plugs had neutral/earth reversal.

I do work for Age Concern (or rather the elderly on their books), and this serbian guy rang up to say that some of his appliance plugs were getting "a little warm". Found a combination of loose plug-top connections, loose socket connections and elderly sockets (1951!) You know the type, you plug stuff in and there's no resistance at all....and when it's in it slops around like a ***** in a ****** ******* (leave that bit to your extremely fertile imaginations!)

I'm not sure what the colour code in Yugoslavia was in the 1940's - there probably wasn't one (he came here in 1946) but he is sure getting the conductors muddled up!

 

[AdamW]

GAAAGH!!!!!

Thank goodness he (obviously) didn't walk around touching metal-cased electrical items!

I found that the cowboy who wired my parents' extension a good 10 years before they bought the house had wired up some (not all) fittings with the earth conductor carrying live. The fact that he had taken the trouble to put earth sleeving over the conductors and then wired them into the live connectors still puzzles me...