Home DIY

Birch ply, innit. I love the way it looks! Beginning to get obsessed.
Might start doing a low key production thing of the bike racks at some point - depends how quickly i can make em.

wtf are those heavy duty liners/bags called for putting masonry, carpet cuttings, general home decorating shite into before taking to tip?

I'll have one.

Rubble sacks?

Ah yes, "heavy duty bin liners" was giving me nothing. Thanking you.

Hold on. I must of missed these? Pics? Also in love with birch ply, so easy to work with.

It was in the bike storage thread - but in case you can't be arsed to look for that one, I'll post the pic here....

I'm slowly getting my carpentry skills back, and now I've finally built myself a workbench and proper work space, I'm really getting my groove back. Just ordered some spenny chisels today, which will hopefully ensure that making box and dovetail joints is a little less painful!

Your carpentry skills look significantly better than your bike cleaning skills...

Fuck me that a bodge, 1.5mm cables or 2.5mm?

Mixture

My CV is a hard sell. I started out painting and decorating, carpentry was a hobby. Got better at decorating and started to offer carpentry to customers. Picked up more carpentry work and customers would ask for electrical work and plumbing too. Reached the dizzy heights of bathroom and kitchen fitting which can include all the trades if you work alone. Part P came along and suddenly I couldn't do garden wiring, bathrooms, kitchens without a quals. So I stopped doing larger electrical works and stuck to extending circuits in allowed locations, replacing broken fittings etc. Whilst graduating to making custom free-standing furniture and specialising in restoration of sash windows. Last year I decided to do the exams for part P and BS7671 in order to gain a better understanding of the regs and potentially carry out more electrical work.

So strictly speaking I'm not a sparks, I have a fair amount of relevant experience and the qualifications, but an apprenticed and experienced sparks of my age will have a load more experience (and sometimes a lot more bad habits). I respect the opinion of more experienced electricians but I now understand what they're on about too, it's a big subject so only time served will really earn a deep knowledge of it.

If the red and black are 2.5 and the earth is 1.5 then that's standard twin and earth for a 32amp ring circuit. If you have red and black in 1.5 connected to red and black 2.5 it would suggest a very dodgy lighting circuit or an equally dodgy spur for a socket.

Haha! It's winter, bike cleaning is a Sisyphean task.

It's a spur, and it lead to a) a cooker, b) a washing machine and c) a socket.

The cooker was gas, so wasn't trying to take 7.2Kw down the 1.5mm wiring, thankfully.

I've removed the wiring and sockets further down the line, as it were, and will stick a socket front-plate on the backbox I uncovered, then get a sparks to wire that back into the CU when convenient.

Well dodgy spur :) Totally the kind of thing that Part P and the regs were designed to put a stop to. Proved to be quite safe over a fair number of years though.

If the cable there is a ring main why not just connect up the socket, does it need re-wiring all the way back to the board?

Sure it wasn't for a cooker hood?

What room will it reside in?

Living room, though it might migrate around a bit.

Writing materials, remotes, books, tablets, cat toys, ?
Can you get hold of those compressive wheels like they have on library step stools? Might be useful if it's migratory.

Have often wondered how these bodges happen. In my opinion rewiring a a whole house/flat is very easy. The hard bit with wiring is fault finding.

The last few places I have rewired I have covered the wiring in galvanized capping. Making sure the the wire can still pulled through to be replaced, seems that every place I get involved with has poor wiring.

What do you think of these:

Well dodgy spur :) Totally the kind of thing that Part P and the regs were designed to put a stop to. Proved to be quite safe over a fair number of years though.

If the cable there is a ring main why not just connect up the socket, does it need re-wiring all the way back to the board?

It's not a ring - wires coming in from the left run back to the CU, exiting to the right go to the various (now removed) sockets and/or appliances.

I'd need to check the other socket in the room, thinking about it that might be where the wires which run to the now-discovered socket have been disconnected.

Sure it wasn't for a cooker hood?

Hah, this kitchen was very much not a cooker-hood style place, it was a "tile over the wallpaper, slap a bunch of MFI cabinets in and then lay vinyl flooring that will curl and cut up in a picosecond".

Wago's, they are apparently very good. They also do a box for maintenance free joints. Yesterday an electrician with loads of experience was telling me he'd seen some fail! Otherwise they seem to be becoming an industry standard, especially for lighting joints now we're all moving away from 3 plate in lighting roses and the wires are in the ceiling space. The advantage with them is the sprung plate that clips the wire, it keeps pressure on the conductor where a screw can deform the conductor and then come loose over time due to movement or ac pulsing.

So the plan is to make it into a ring by connecting the furthest socket on the radial back to the CU?

JFC.

You sound useful. If you've got experience then the course I did would get you to the level where you can apply to be on a scheme. Then you can self-certify any notifiable work. If you have a previous qualification, like a 3 year NVQ then you probably only need Part P and 17th edition C&G. You can take the exams without tuition for less than £200. On part P I went from 60% with no book in online tests, which is still a pass, to 95% in the exam with the book after 4 days tuition. So it's fair to say it's easy enough to get 60% but the course gives you a bit more confidence.