Home DIY

Yeah, the walls and ceiling will be getting a repaint with proper bathroom paint, I think they just use cheap contract general purpose emulsion. Also additional tiles behind the new towel rail and around the new window.

Yeah, Titan's alright. I have a Titan 5kg SDS drill I picked up at Screwfix. Will be fine for the level of use I am likely to subject it to.

Hmm:

Oh:

Wickes 'Professional'.

Can of worms.

Accessibility of joints only entered the regs in 2012 though, so you could expect to find a lot of these around. At least it was mechanically protected by the tiles. There are a few methods for joining that in situ that meet the regs if you are going to tile over it again.

I want you to do any future work I need done on my flat, you strike me as very wise in these matters.
My electrics area bloody mess, opened up a couple of sockets to switch them out and it was a quick "nope" and reattach.

Accessibility of joints only entered the regs in 2012 though, so you could expect to find a lot of these around. At least it was mechanically protected by the tiles. There are a few methods for joining that in situ that meet the regs if you are going to tile over it again.

Those wires are not connected to anything, mainly because we couldn't get a stable earth for the socket to which they lead.

I might now put a socket where that rats nest is, given that we have a solid L/N/E back to the consumer unit (when re-attached).

Snowed under at the moment, I've got 12 months of work lined up! Been turning down 2 jobs a week since the start of January. I think it shows how the market has changed in London, teams of trades doing renovations and no-one wants to touch the smaller jobs.

I did just take and pass the exams for Part P and BS7671 though, that's why my electrical fu is strong atm.

Light sockets throw most people, the colours don't mean what they usually mean and half the time they're not sleeved to let you know they could be line conductors. Never assume that a blue or black wire in a light switch is neutral.

That reminds me of a situation we had in a 6-bed shared flat in Clapton a few years back. The shower room was converted from a corner of one of the bedrooms (they were all huge rooms).

We used to get electric shocks from our non-electric shower - but it was difficult to work out why, and sometimes they wouldn't happen at all. For some reason whoever had the last shower of the morning always got the worst shock - in fact it took a while for us to convince the early riser of the flat that there was anything wrong. Eventually the shocks became more and more frequent and powerful, til they started tripping the circuit breaker. I developed a knack of showering without touching the taps. The landlord sent his hapless handyman round many times but could never work out what the problem was. Eventually the shower started leaking into the living room below, and after having patched it up a number of times the ceiling fell down. At this point we insisted that the landlord get the shower properly sealed rather than just splurging another load of silicon round the edge again.

When the workmen came round to rip out all the tiles I heard a scream from upstairs and all the lights went out. The workmen walked out and refused to return. Evidently when the shower room was created, the shower cubicle had been placed where there had once been a socket. The socket had been removed but the backbox and all the wiring had just been tiled over. As the shower had leaked more and more, the wall became damp and had been conducting electricity back up the wall to the shower taps, which was then giving us all a dose of 240v. The damper the wall was, the worse the shocks got - hence the later showerers getting a nastier shock. anyway the wiring was all ripped out and made good when the new shower was put in.

We could have reported the LL to the council I suppose, but in the end managed to use the incriminating info to keep our rent frozen for 5 years just as Clapton was becoming very expensive.

Probably best thing, sockets are always useful, unless they are behind a radiator! You might need to put some heat shrink on the wire at the bottom right to make sure you have secondary insulation all the way into the back box. Is it a ring main with a spur?

The most surprising part of that story is that you all kept using the shower having had 1 electric shock.

In a similar pipes and earth story I've discovered that my gas and water pipes are lacking an earth feed back to the consumer unit. I'm planning to upgrade my dated old fused consumer unit for a nice new RCD but the electrician has told me that to certify this the earth feed needs to be in place.

Given my fusebox is at the front of the house and boiler at the back it looks like a wire will have to be led back along the top of the skirting and around door frames or similar. Anything special I need to think about when doing this?

There is also twice as many wires as there should be.
I actually want to get into some sort of trade, would love to renovations and the like. I have an interview for a plumbing course at a local college this week but I have a feeling its for youngsters.
Any tips on how to get into the field?

kitchen, not bathroom one hopes!

double back box (probably for an old socket faceplate) with an unidentified spur circuit darting off bottom right.

Be worthwhile tracing that and possibly cutting it back into the ring.

It was more like tingles than shocks to begin with. Plus the sporadic nature of it, and the fact that it would never show itself unless you were actually stood in the shower and the wall happened to be soaking (info we didn't realise at the time) - meaning that whenever an electrician tested the shower it showed up as fine. So that it was difficult to see anything was wrong. If you're not expecting mains current in your shower then it's surprising how you excuse it!

Just. Wow.

your utility pipes, if metallic, should be bonded back to a Main Earth Terminal (MET) at the incoming point of the electricity supply, i.e. where the meter is.

if this is not the case then contact your electricity supplier and have them install the MET. sometimes an electrician will do this, but there are cases where the methods used are unsatisfactory, and if the electricity supplier finds out it's been bodged then they're not happy.

once a nice solid earth reference in place then the metallic pipework can be connected via tagged band clamps, plus a substantial earth tail run into the new CU.

Plumbing is worthwhile but it takes time to qualify and costs money. The best deal I've found so far for gas safe qualification was £6000 and 6 months working for free. The electrical course I took was £1800 and you can go from zero to 3 c&gs in 4 weeks, give or take scheduling. Of course it's only a small part of the trade, mostly focussed on designing and testing new circuits. Not cable pulling etc.

I started so long ago it's a faint memory. Probably the best way to start is as an apprentice/helping out a mate, if you feel you're too old for that then you can take on work for less money than market rates and take a bit longer over it until you get experience and tools together. I still spend at least £1500 a year on tools to make life easier/improve the end result. I've never really worked on building sites, mostly domestic and that's the market most trades want to avoid. It's very hard to recommend as an occupation except in terms of job satisfaction, that part of it can be rewarding.

Doing a course is a good introduction to the whole process though, if you can get all the way to gas safe qualified then there's good money to be made and you're working in a trade with some protection.

It's difficult to see from the photos because it looks like a ring and a spur, that would be 3 x twin and earth, so 9 individual conductors.

Thanks for the info. I think its prob a case of having the balls to make the jump but I am currently feeling sitting in front of a screen for 8 hours a day is not something I can carry on doing forever... I know it's wildly different to doing anything professionally but I feel enormous satisfaction when doing DIY projects at home, much more than anything I do work related, even personal work.

I don't mind starting at the bottom as an apprentice, if it was part time I could still work my regular job to keep some income. Is there anywhere/site where I can hunt out folks after apprentices? I have a few mates who are trades too so might ask them but mixing friends/business is always a bit of a tough one.

I am also acutely aware that every overweight middle aged media-working prick in Shoreditch wants to "work with their hands" and that I very much fall into that category.

Here's my next DIY project... a sort of stool/steps/table thing.
Still trying to work out what to do with the space at the back - wondered about a cat bed but the little fuckers never use any bed we make for them, ungrateful fuckers.

put a box in it, then when carrying the steps to the intended job, you can put the tools and bits needed for changing the lightbulb into the box.

The sparky I used last time is no longer available - anyone know of a good one in SE23?

Are you using that laminated stuff you made your bike hook from?