Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist Ah, dear reader, once again it is time to greet the day with a tale from Who, Me? – the Reg's welcome to the working week in which readers spill the beans on tech stuff-ups that may or may not have been their fault. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Larry" who was commissioned to install a room full of servers at a …
At university, we were able to do an unrelated STEM module in the first year, leading to quite a few issues in the lab. The most entertaining afternoon came from a microbiology practical where someone had somehow never used a Bunsen before. This led to the gas being ignited at the outlet.
When they tried to turn the gas off for the lab, they discovered the fresh new fitted benches had been installed over the shutoff valve for the room (the outburst from the crusty technician was awe inspiring). This led to several frantic minutes of locating a screwdriver and dismantling the bench before the ceiling went from medium to well done.
A while back when we got a new combi installed, I was chatting to one of the installers. He said that when he was refurbing his kitchen (which was in a rear extension), he took up the flooring, only to find an unexpected manhole cover over an access shaft - with a ladder, no less - leading down some considerable distance into what presumably was some of Thames Water's finest infrastructure. I think he said he covered it up again, with the new floor, and just hopes it is never needed as an access point.
A 15mm pipe comes out from under our house and empties into an external drain. There had never been any sign of water exiting from it.
It turned out that it comes from a drain cock for the central heating system. The drain cock is sited in the corner of a room, under plank-flooring which has been re-laid with no immediate access hatch, and to make doubly sure, kitchen units have been installed above.
How do I know there is a drain cock ? Well, the single access point under this floor is from an adjacent room, from where one crawls through a gap in the supporting wall under a doorway, the gap being 4 bricks high. One then does a sharp right-hand turn to crawl down a "corridor" between two supporting walls a doorwidth apart to find the draincock at the far end, and no turning area. Oh, and the local pipework and tap were all uninsulated. The ever-giving surprises of home ownership.
I've just discovered the rusty consumer unit three horse stables from the house actually runs the power to the outbuildings so the mains for it runs from the house consumer unit 50 yds or so the to office rusty unit and then back through the three stables to where the freezers were off as water had dripped into it and tripped it but not the one in the house. Lots of lovely food to eat as had just started thawing when I found out. Only been here 17 years!
Now to find someone who can do spray insulation foam to stop the dripping!
"Now to find someone who can do spray insulation foam to stop the dripping!"
Not entirely sure what part of the building you want to insulate, but you might want to read:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-cant-sell-our-house-because-it-has-spray-foam-insulation-0cfsrdbpm
Even if you get the right stuff, and installed correctly, it seems to get surveyors worried - recently looked at a building survey for a friend where the surveyor was very concerned about foam loft insulation.
I must admit to 'fixing' a leaking pipe somewhere at the back of my toilet by spraying expanding foam at it. In my defence the leaky bit was in some boxwork which would be very hard to take apart and the actual leak was out of site and even touch. So I just bought a tin of expanding foam, pointed the nozzle in the general direction that the leak was coming from and pressed fire. Most of it fell off and created a big stalegmite but it stopped the leak. I know at some point many years away someone will take that boxing apart and see this and I will feel the much deserved derision.
"Now to find someone who can do spray insulation foam to stop the dripping!"
Spray foam insulation might hide the dripping, but it won't stop it. Being hidden, you'll fail to notice the rot setting in until the roof collapses.
"Out of sight, out of mind" is not a good thing when it comes to roofs.
You never know what you'll find in an old house.
When we moved in to this place, there were two overhead light fixtures in the downstairs hallway, about a foot and a half apart. One was controlled by the normal wall switches, one upstairs & one down. The other was always on, with no switch, so we removed the bulb. It wasn't until I started tearing into the attic space to create my office that I discovered that the downstairs hallway light was controlled by the attic light switches ... Turned out that a prior home-owner decided that leaving a light on down three flights of stairs was a good way to remember to turn off the attic light ... but his wiring skills didn't include knowledge of using three switches to control one light. I added a third switch downstairs, and kept the overhead indicator.
When I first started working on the house (was a "Victorian" farmhouse before I bastardized it), I discovered to my horror that no fewer than 12 unused 3/4" copper water pipes were still pressurized, but were sealed off with nothing more than a wine cork and a couple well placed dents (peens). Seems the elderly gent who owned it before me was a bit of a DIY guy and decided to move two full baths and the kitchen sink. Seems he didn't need the old copper, because he was an early adopter of PEX ... Not a one of them dripped even once, judging by the dust underneath them.
I moved into my 100 year old house in the spring.
Once winter came and I turned on the heater, located in the basement, I noticed some squirrel cage vibration.
Vibration went away as soon as I opened the heater access panel...hmmmn.
Eventually tracked it back to a vent in the floor of the main level had been covered with new flooring.
Once I cut an opening and put the floor vent grate back in place.. all good.
Of course, if the vent gets covered by misc junk, vibrations return.
>> never buy a house where you don’t know where the sewers are
Oh so true!
Our sewer at the rear of our house drains across the yard into next door where there are loads of inspection chambers , then down the side of their house to another inspection chamber (roof drain feeds there) then off down to the street...
You would think
But no, it turns 90 degrees across the front of our properties, then once almost across ours does another 90 degree turn towards the street where it eventually meets the chamber in the middle of said street.
No inspection chambers, nada, nothing. Only found out when our lead water pipe was being replaced and the installer found this pipe after digging through it. Turned on our tap and quite a pause later water flowed.............
This summer, we found sewage leaking behind our (rented) house. We swiftly got the plumbers round, and they dug a hole to find that the main black-water downpipe went into the ground and...nothing else. We had a couple of weeks of putting up with a large hole by the side of the house, full of sewage. While the contractors tried to work out if the 150 year old house had ever been connected to the sewage network.
Eventually they found the connection to the mains, but a one meter section of clay pipe was completely missing. No one had any idea what had happened to it.
A month or so later, just before the hottest day of the year, we found that the work must have stirred up more problems, when the connection to the main sewer literally burst up through the pavement outside. Mad respect to the guys from Wessex Water who turned up to fix it, literally knee deep in shit, in 30°C heat, and they remained chipper throughout.
When I purchased my first house, I found a bare wire hanging in the garage. Being fortunately paranoid when it comes to electricity, I tested this before touching - good thing too, as it was live. It took a long time to trace the wire back, and found it ran through the garden wall, up the house, through the ceiling of the kitchen extension, into the back bedroom, along the landing, and was an unfused spur coming from the plug socket there.
The previous owners had a laissez-faire approach to electrical wiring; the downstairs ring main had been cut in order to wire in a couple more sockets at some time, too.
I spent a long time bringing the wiring up to code myself, before getting in a qualified sparky to certify it.
Not quite as bad, but when I helped my daughter remodel her bathroom, we added a foot or so by moving one wall of an overly-large pipe chase. Before opening the old wall I went into the adjoining bathroom (the house has back-to-back bathrooms, one for the master suite and one for the other bedrooms) and pulled out an in-wall cabinet, which I rightly assumed opened into the space, to have a look.
There was a wire hanging in the space, and a quick check with the non-contact current detector showed it was live. Investigation revealed it came from the box for the kitchen microwave. I added a box for it, then ran branches to a new receptacle in each bathroom, because they were under-supplied; but it was certainly a bit of a head-scratcher.
Come to think of it, in my old house I found a live wire not connected to anything, up in the attic. And this was a whole coil, probably 25 feet of 12-G NM. Why would you connect a line to the supply before running it to whatever termination you had in mind? Some people are just stupid, I guess.
> when he was refurbing his kitchen.... unexpected manhole cover ... some of Thames Water's finest infrastructure. ...
Our 1830 farmhouse's ex dairy shed, now kitchen, had a nailed-over floor patch. I didn't want to know what was down there. (A lot of funky junk happened to that house.)
Finally we prepared to install a fresh new floor, so I pried.
Was a 6'x6'x6' (say 2mX2mX2m) vault. With a bit of small lead pipe coming up. (I already knew lead pipe, and a Lead Pipe Cinch, because the new-for-1910 toilet was on a lead elbow.)
I went down there. It was a water cistern. At some time it had a pump (hand or electric we never knew). The lead pipe ran to some grotty iron pipe, and I had grounded the electric to the stub cuz the house had no good dirt-rod. The vault was hardly damp, so the water musta come from somewhere else. Roof gutters? A delivery truck? Had they diverted the creek a few hundred feet away?
We sat on the edge for a while, wondering what or who to put in there, then just nailed it off.
... he took up the flooring, only to find an unexpected manhole cover over an access shaft - with a ladder, no less - leading down some considerable distance into what presumably was some of Thames Water's finest infrastructure. I think he said he covered it up again...
I happily admit that if I found something like that, there is no way on God's green earth I would cover it permanently. That is crying out for a concealed trap door. "No, Mr Insurance Inspector, I had no idea that was there."
When we finish building Mountain Fastness 2.0 I would really like to dig a tunnel from it to Mountain Fastness 1.0. Neither building has a basement, though, so I'd really probably want to do it between two outbuildings. And the ground here is agonizing to dig in (there's a thick layer of karst, or caliche in the local vernacular, just a foot or so underground; and even the soil is dense and largely defloccinated by centuries of irrigation), so realistically it's not going to happen.
Try the following - totally safe for work, although you may be in a good mood for the rest of the day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1dvAxA9ib0
Rather the opposite of the 'Who Me?' story, but I too have seen a gas tap alight, although this was at school and the chemistry teacher turned it off pretty quick.
When I was in school back in the 80's, our Chemistry teacher was in the habit of ducking below his bench as soon as the lesson ended and light up a crafty between lessons fag.
One day Sir had pissed of one of the kids, so as the lad was leaving the lesson he ran his hand across the teacher's desk, turning on all the gas taps.
Let's just say that was the last time that particular teacher lit a cigarette in his classroom...
For some reason our chemistry lab at school had no u-bends in the sinks. The end result of which was you could fill the sink with gas, wait a few moments and fire flame out of most of the sinks in the room. I repeated this experiment on mains drainage several years later to discover our towns and cities are really not safe!
Chemistry labs often (usually?) have a "special" drainage arrangement to avoid pouring Things What Ought Not Be down the public sewer.
A U-bend is also where said chemicals are likely to remain, and mixing certain of them is a very bad idea, releasing quite nastily toxic gases.
frantic minutes of locating a screwdriver and dismantling the bench
I'd have gone with "find stick , preferably metal, to poke bunsen tap back to off position" ...or indeed the tradional method of wet cloth over fire / blazing gas tap
I've given this some thought as I almost burnt a mountain cabin down when I was a kid that had this exact setup in kitchen for cooking.
My brother once worked for a plumber contracted to do maintenance on an Australian Army base. For basic stuff like replacing tap washers, there was no handy mains tap to turn off the water or available plans that show where pipes go. After unsuccessfully trying to track pipes using a metal detector they considered freezing the pipes but instead just developed the skill of very very quickly replacing a whole tap with the water pressure still on at full pressure.
I dont understand why houses dont come with wiring and pipe diagrams
It costs thousands to do the process of buying a house and you dont even get a) a wiring/pipe diagram b) a detailed accurate measure of where the boundaries are (i just got an A4 sheet with a diagram of 100 house boundaries and mine , size of a stamp , highlighted)
I dont understand why houses dont come with wiring and pipe diagrams
Even when they do (I have the original plans for our current house, built in the 1960s) you can't trust them, as several owners decide to do work on their own....
Our previous house, built in 1894, we did not know until we had moved in that there were lines for gaslight throughout the house that were still live. We unscrewed one and whoosh, with the unmistakable odor. YIKES! We got them properly capped at the meter, opened and blown out at the earliest possible appointment. Wonder how many of our neighbors in that street of terraced houses still had the same, and how they were still all standing.
We bought a new house and went to the site managers office to ask to see the wiring and pipe plans before we moved in. He showed the paper plans to us on the table, but wouldn't let us take photographs as they were proprietary. However, I think the real reason is the builders are so shoddy the actual location of the wires and pipes bears very little relation to the plans, and they don't want anyone holding them to account for things being in the wrong place.
Also don't ever let them convince you that you can measure up the supposedly identical show house while yours is being completed, Despite having the same size window frames, the jambs were up to an up to half an inch different, and the room sizes varied up to 2 inches.
No, the layers are not too hard to clear. That is a lame excuse. Three minutes with a sledgehammer and I guarantee those layers will be gone, along with that part of the wall.
Then you can redo the wall, the connections and the red button, and you can even put a nice clear plexiglass guard to keep said button from getting inadvertantly pressed again.
Because just painting the layers in red in one spot is not going to solve the problem.
We went to a bank with a large,very plush conference room. There was no screen to project onto - nor power sockets etc. Just plain oak panelled walls. Eventually we found you had to press the touch a specific panel (gently) and abracadabra - doors opened and a big screen came out. Press another panel and a camera came out for tele-conferencing. We had to get a passing executive's PA to show us what to touch to get the power sockets to rise out of the desk.
We found on the last day that another panel on the wall was actually an entrance to a kitchen.
It must have cost a fortune.
There were lots of conference rooms like that in the early Silly Con Valley. Did they show you the lap pool(s), sauna(s) and hot tub(s)? I know of one building which had three of each, in each of the founder's office suites. None were ever used, to the best of my knowledge ... but were still maintained in fully working condition some 30 years later. What a fucking waste.
I visited the St Pancras hotel just before it was renovated. It had last been used by British Rail and its successors as a communication centre, with a machine room and operators in what had been the ornate ground floor restaurant. I was horrified to see that at some point a suspended ceiling had been put in, and everything below it painted in thick white emulsion. Elaborate plasterwork, wood panelling and all fittings - caked in paint that had then yellowed with age and several generations of workers smoking at their desks.
There is the Spire in Poole
https://www.thespirepoole.co.uk/the-spire
An old church down the high Street in Poole, arched doors and windows and err... pointy bits. They've recently expanded it with a bloody ugly extension on the back. Just an ugly block (see link above). On the inside where it joins the old church, they have a flat ceiling, lower than the top of the arched windows, effectively just blocking it off
Facadism (or in this case I'd go with Fasodomy) must die. It's an absolutely horrendous trend. Personally I can't ever remember seeing a "renovated" building that kept an old facade alive and have it look good.
Too many architects still follow the brutalist teachings of Le Corbusier and SO MANY architecture students still get beaten into submission if they hand in any assignment with anything other than a brutalist, clashing, steel and concrete monstrosity.
Gotta love the slop dash that some renovations bring... A room is supposed to look 'better' after the renovations. I once lived in an apartment in Chicago, there were so many layers of "emulsion" on the walls that the electrical outlets looked like Pink Floyd's pig pushing through the wall!
We have an office which was redecorated. I'm an amateur when it comes to these things, but before painting I Polyfilla in holes and cracks, sand down and then paint over the top. The cowboys who did the job simply painted over with zero prep work.
I've never seen a worse job in all my life, and I don't know how anybody could do such a bad job; I find it professionally offensive to look at.
At a previous factory type job - company decided to get the floor painted, did it on the cheap - boss' son did it during his school holidays.
He didn't bother sweeping up first, so where bits of masking tape have been left on the floor, you peel them off and get little patches of old floor colour. The real fun bit was where most of the company watched him literally paint himself into a corner......
I once rented the third floor of a house whose first floor (ground floor in right-pondian, I think) was being renovated. This place was so old that the 2x4's were actually 2" X 4". In fact, we could date it; they found a newspaper from 1906 buried inside a wall. [1]
Under numerous layers of paint were numerous layers of wallpaper. I took a chunk of the detritus and soaked it in water to delaminate it. It was an interesting study in the changing fashions over the previous 80ish years. The only ones I remember were mint-green paint and some flocked floral wallpaper patterns that I considered hideously old-fashioned, but must once have been très chic.
The owner, who was living on the second floor, was doing much of the work. One day he came to me with a problem. (If this were IT- and job-related, it would belong in On Call.) He'd somehow (I forget how) severed some ancient but still-in-service knob-and-tube wiring leading to the upper floors [2], and needed help figuring out which way around to reconnect the wires [3]. I asked for a long extension cord, and got him to plug it into one of the dead sockets upstairs and run it down to the "injury" site, while I went to fetch my multimeter. Then I did continuity tests between the dangling K&T wires and the extension's socket to figure out which wire should be live, and which neutral. I can't recall how I figured out which of the wires coming up from the basement *was* live, but presumably it involved plugging the extension into a redone -- and so grounded -- outlet, and doing voltage measurements between those two wires and the extension's ground.
[1] Not very old at all by British standards, but you know what they say: "Brits think 100 miles is a long distance. North Americans think 100 years is a long time."
[2] Yes, of course it all had to go, but they were doing the reno one floor at a time. Once they finished the first floor, he and his wife moved into it and they started work on the second, including its wiring. By the time they (presumably) got to what had been my floor, I was gone for other reasons.
[3] Any such luxuries as colour coding were long in 1906's future.
And you think these problems only occur in old homes?
I purchaced my current home new. the 1st Christmas in the house we are putting lights up on the outside of the house. Brand new LED christmas lights. I plug them into the outside outlet and they light up but are very dim. Damn! Take them down and take them in the house and plug into an outlet in the house, they work fine. Hmmm, WTF!
My father was an electrician so I have a good working knowlwdge of electricity. My though is "Something's not right with the outside outlet." So I proceed to remove the outlet and inspect. As I pull out the outlet the neutral wire just slides out. It had never been secured down. OMG! I proceed to check all the outside outlets, same issue. I then check all the other inside outlets, at least half of them have the same problem. I find it unthinkable that this could even pass inspection.
About 3 years later my wife is complaining that some of the inside plugs are loose in the outlets. So I inspect and she's right. So I open the outlet to inspect, As I'm pulling out the outlet it disintegrates in my hand. The plastic is literaly crumbling. So that weekend I replace every outlet in the house. At least half are in the same condition! Cheap Chinese garbage!
When I bought my house there were 17 layers of wallpaper in the living room. The last but one was woodchip.
It was about a quarter inch (6mm) thick…
They had obviously redecorated by adding another layer each time.
In the hall and stairs it was similar but this had a layer of dark green paint at the bottom of the wallpaper instead.
My daughter and her husband bought a between the wars semi in Leeds. My Sister in Law and I went up to help them redecorate (we were both recently bereaved at the time), and we found that the whole house was a sort of tan coloured inside, and stank of tobacco smoke. The previous occupants had both smoked like chimneys, and the neighbours told us that the old man had literally smoked himself to death after his wife died of some other unspecified disease.
We started stripping the wallpaper, only to find that the nicotine had soaked right through all five layers of wallpaper and coloured the plaster as well, so that all had to come off. As did the ceiling plaster.
By the time we had stripped everything back to allow for the installation of the central heating system, the four of us were basically camping in a bare brick box.
>> dark green paint at the bottom
Similar here, woodchip everywhere (my parents loved it as well including the polystyrene ceiling tiles!), painted either green or brown. I think it was done to feel "warm".
Kitchen to dining room door frame, stripped of the magnolia paint, then found light blue, then green and finally some awful brown stuff (paint stripper seemed to just melt it) that was hell to remove but managed it in the end.
When my wife and I moved into our 1934 house in 1982, everything was painted Eau de Nil, a horrible pale greenish blue colour. The wallpaper was light cream with tiny blue flowers scattered seemingly at random. We spent many hours over the next couple of years stripping off the paint and wax polishing the pine woodwork so revealed, and repapering all the rooms differently. Our bedroom, for example, was red and white Regency Stripe, our eldest daughter expressed a desire for lemon yellow, the youngest preferred pink, the lounge and dining room were both light beige, and the kitchen and bathroom were painted light blue. When we stripped the original wallpaper off, we found that the decorators had signed the wall by the door in each room with their company name and the date, in 1956, so the previous occupants had never redecorated in all the time they were there.
The bungalow that I am renting now was painted Magnolia throughout immediately before I moved here in 2017.
Well the kitchen in the house had the walls in artex. To the point it was put on so thickly that your fingers rested in the grooves. It appears to have been done by slapping about 1/2” of wet plaster down and then running fingers through it to texture it, as this was in the kitchen you can guess the amount of grease and grime in there.
It all go stripped out and a new kitchen fitted instead..
During the monotonous hours on the night shift, I can clearly remember some awesome butt-clenching moments when objects thrown across the machine room hit the wall perilously close to the infamous red button.
I know of at least one occasion when the button was hit (apparently an awesome but unexpected shot) that left me recovering systems when I rolled up to start my shift.
I was just putting the finishing touches on a small cluster of vaxen at SLAC one fine Friday afternoon. The annual Big Game between Stanford & Berkeley was to be the following day. A couple of grad students started passing a football (American version) between themselves. In the glass room (that wasn't glass). Just as I was threatening mayhem if they didn't knock it off, the ball hit the Big Red Button. Needless to say, a bunch of very pissed off people couldn't attend the game the following day. The grad student's computer privileges were suspended for the rest of the academic year. Personally, I'd have hung them by the thumbs in the Quad as a warning ...
As someone else postulated up-thread, this may have been a government facility. Most of these in the UK are self-insured, meaning that if anything goes wrong at a government site the government pays for it.
Of course, this is conjecture. As is the assumption that the decorator at the time cared about insurance at all.
I would postulate that the decorator in question could well have been some manager's son's new painting business. In this case, any shoddy work would have been swept under the rug.
At one SillyConValley startup, I volunteered to replace a bunch of power sockets after an insurance company denied coverage due to inappropriate paint. Took an afternoon, and the guy was nice enough to re-inspect it before going home, so we were allowed to occupy the premises on schedule the next day.
At another company, I was in the glass room when an insurance guy found a drip of paint on the BRB and pulled coverage immediately. Heads rolled over that one.
Prepare for a tale of woe! (Well, a white, middle class western male, tale of woe, at least.)
In the UK we have pull cord switches in our bathrooms. My venerable switch cord broke inside the mechanism (it had been going for over 35 years so a reasonable lifetime for a thin nylon cord). So one of my friends laughed at me when I said I needed an electrician to fit the replacement I had sourced form a local DIY store. SO, yup, I tried it myself. DIY turned into a nightmare. One screw for the fitting came out ok, the other just got stiffer the more I turned it (and yes, I was turning it anti-clockwise, you need some intelligence to f*&k things ups well and proper). I realised I was in danger of stripping the slot from the brass screw head, so stopped.
One of my friends* works supporting technology for a major utility company, and is used to dealing with recalcitrant screws, so I got him to come and have a go. Well, he used his intelligence and expertise and experience to shear the head of the bad screw entirely, but did manage to replace the mechanism so I still had light in the windowless bathroom.
So then I got a MAN in to do the job. Nice chap. He could not get the bad screw out, and anyway the replacement switch I had was a different size, so would not fit into the installed back box, so he provided a new one with the old size fitting, held in by one screw. I had to stand on a chair to hold the fitting so it did not break every time I pulled the cord. I said I wanted the job done properly, so he came back, used a chisel and some WD40 to remove the old screw, repaired the back box and used a new, slightly wider screw to fit the thing back up.
I now have a new switch in the bathroom and am down £216 (parts and labour). Anyone want an unused pull-switch?
It really can be useful to get a professional in to do what should be an easy job if, like me, you really do not have a clue what you are doing.
(I am sure that Jake is a highly competent handyman, but we are not all like that.)
* I do have friends, honestly, not many, I admit, but some.
I am at the point where i need to get professionals in , due to age and lack of motivation , and being able to afford it these days.
... but i find the idea of ringing random tradesmen to get a quote or whatever more scary than the renovations!
Seriously?
Rip out the backbox, find where the piece of actual timber in the ceiling it's screwed to is or put a random bit of 2x1 up there to spread the load, fill the hole with damp-resistant polyfilla and screw a surface mount pullcord switch to said timber.
Done. An hour or two DIY plus £15 for the switch, tops.
Note: Do not fit additional switches or light fittings, and do not move the switch more than a few cm, because that would come under Part P and you really don't want to deal with that piece of awful legislation.
Part P's not actually that bad.
2.7 Regulation 12(6A) sets out electrical installation work that is notifiable. All other electrical installation work is not notifiable – namely additions and alterations to existing installations outside special locations, and replacements, repairs and maintenance anywhere.
So you could put a new switch in, replace the light with an LED, add another ceiling rose, move the switch location by a meter, and still not be in scope of part P notifiable work; all of this work being additions, alterations, replacement or repairs to an existing installation. As long as you don't do anything notifiable below:-
(ie; don't replace the fusebox or add new circuits to it, or install stuff within arms reach of the bathtub/shower)
Notifiable work
2.5 Electrical installation work that is notifiable is set out in regulation 12(6A).
12.—(6A) A person intending to carry out building work in relation to which Part P of Schedule 1 imposes a requirement is required to give a building notice or deposit full plans where the work consists of—
(a) the installation of a new circuit;
(b) the replacement of a consumer unit; or
(c) any addition or alteration to existing circuits in a special location.
—(9) In this regulation “special location” means—
(a) within a room containing a bath or shower, the space surrounding a bath tap
or shower head, where the space extends—
(i) vertically from the finished floor level to—
(aa) a height of 2.25 metres; or
(bb) the position of the shower head where it is attached to a wall or
ceiling at a point higher than 2.25 metres from that level; and
(ii) horizontally—
(aa) where there is a bath tub or shower tray, from the edge of the bath
tub or shower tray to a distance of 0.6 metres; or
(bb) where there is no bath tub or shower tray, from the centre point
of the shower head where it is attached to the wall or ceiling to a
distance of 1.2 metres; or
(b) a room containing a swimming pool or sauna heater.
Practically nobody, including myself when I added an extra bulb into a cupboard so I didn't need a torch to find things in it, and again myself when the bulb in my bathroom blew and Wickes didn't sell the somewhat odd bulbs, but did sell replacement LED light fittings and so the fitting ended up being replaced instead of the bulb.
And yet none of it has actually broken any rules. ;)
It's pretty obvious really; if you weren't allowed to do minor works then places like Wickes wouldn't sell you the stuff to do them unless you could produce a qualified electricians certificate in the same way as you can't buy certain other materials that are considered naughty by the authorities. (or they allow you to buy them, having taken sufficient details to ensure an later visit by said authorities to ask pointed and detailed questions about what you are doing with them)
Was it on the Monday morning? (for those that don't get it)
This post has been deleted by its author
Yes, this is true; it was the policy of the MoD not to insure anything (except maybe they had to insure vehicles to comply with the Road Traffic Act(s)?). I think this was on the principle that you can't insure a battleship, so why bother with the office.
The point is that if you're a big enough organization (and they don't come bigger than governments) it's cheaper to self-insure. If you buy insurance, you're paying a rate that will, on average, meet the expected level of payouts with a margin over to give the insurer a profit. Fair enough if you're too small an organization or too poor an individual (like me) to bear the risk; you pay someone else to take the risk, with a bit over to allow them to stay in business. But if you're a big organization, then it makes more sense to shoulder the risk, as on the whole it will be cheaper by the profit margin of the insurance company. Of course, legally required insurance is unavoidable - but, for example, I think that company cars in such circumstances are only third party insured (the legal minimum in the UK)
Way off topic, but when I was working for a rather large oil company back in the 1980's, the vouchers issued for car rentals excluded insurance (as the company "self insured"). It was amazing how low the actual rental costs were. It also meant upgrades were more routinely offered: in one instance, I got a Ford Sierra XR4x4 in lieu of a standard small saloon (ISTR is cost something around £20/day).
Back when I was driving a company car, only a couple of years ago, our company insurance policy was any authorised driver in any authorised (and notified) vehicle. Car hire costs for when ours were off the road for a service or repair were similarly low at something in the order of £20 per day for a week, maybe £30 per day for one or two days and we similarly were frequently "upgraded" to whatever was available if the requested grade wasn't in stock. Hiring the same car as a private individual, using my own insurance cover, is way, way more expensive than corporate hire.
" maybe they had to insure vehicles to comply with the Road Traffic Act(s)?"
If you are rich enough you can (could?) just deposit a suitably large sum at the Bank of England to cover possible claims. When I were a lad it was about £200k, but now ...
I doubt it now, the only two compulsory forms of insurance in the UK is for vehicles on public roads, and employee insurance.
But it is normally smart to have some cover for other things, assuming (unlike the MOD case) the exclusions are not going to render it useless. It is the same with some spacecraft launches, the premiums can be so high that it comes to "self insuring" the launch, especially in the case of a first real-world launch of a new rocket with real payload(s).
Until relatively recently, the legal definition in the UK was the driver needed insurance, not the vehicle. Which actually makes a lot of sense.
This was then perverted by the insurance companies to make sure that the driver needed separate coverage for each car they owned. Then with the advent of ANPR, the government decided that they wanted to be able to check insurance by license plate no. So now every car needs insurance.
We ended up with a daft situation where your policy can cover you to drive your mate's car, but it's not valid unless your mate also has a policy on that car.
Which is fair enough, but what happens if you have an accident (your fault), seriously injure someone and that although you ‘might’, theoretically have 50k available at one point, right now you are a bit strapped for cash?
The basic idea, well at least on this side of the pond, is that irrespective of how rich you are, or claim to be, a private citizen is legally obliged to have insurance via a ‘reputable company’ on the grounds that no matter what happens, the innocent third (injured) party gets paid out - and I can imagine that might be somewhat more pressing in the US, re. health care, short or long term. Arguments are then between the driver and the insurance company.
Now I’m not necessarily arguing which system is best, but honestly, what happens in the US if someone doesn’t have insurance and just isn’t in a position to fund treatment for an injured party. Yes, of course you can sue, but if the driver, simply doesn’t have money to give, then that’ll go nowhere irrespective of any Court ruling!
Genuinely, I’m just curious, in this case are there any State level or Federal level safety nets at all?
Same applies to local councils. They are their own insurers in most cases for most things. They might have employee and public liability cover and maybe some other special or edge cases, but on the whole, it's cheaper to do it themselves than to pay exorbitant policy prices.
Even when I first got involved in IT the cost of a new computer suite was normally a large proportion of the cost of the mainframe it would be housing, the fact that the floor had originally been orange and brown point to this site having been a late 1970's / early 1980's installation of an ICL mainframe when the cabinets were still hot tango.
A few years earlier they would have been blue cabinets, a few years late they would have been Argentinian grey.
Over time computer rooms became less of a place to showcase though incredibly expensive and modern technology to be places to hide the expensive kit from that 'cost center' known as IT. lees and less money was available for things like computer suite renovation and kit was downsized from large mainframes to racks of generic cabinets holding rack mount cabinets. this resulted in kludges like this, pulling off the floor tile anti static carpet hen it was worn and just laying cheep carpet over the tiles (cutting round the edges was optional) instead of commissioning highly paid specialist companies to do computer suite refurbishments, the 'machine room' was the painted by the local handyman using whatever emulsion was used to paint the corridors. thankfully the fact that even a small Data Center holds £1M+ and runs the whole organisation more care is being taken again on things like fire detection and suppression including making sure there are no flammables within the DC and that all breaks into the DC from outside are adequately protected with active or passive sealants.
"1980's installation of an ICL mainframe when the cabinets were still hot tango.
A few years earlier they would have been blue cabinets, a few years late they would have been Argentinian grey."
One of my colleagues at ICL in the 1980's phoned the Bracknell service desk for help with the mainframe he was working remotely on (from Reading). She asked him "is it the blue one in the corner?" He said "yes" to save time.
Government can be like that. Ours had an overhead fire sprinkler system. The system inlet was set up so that if water started flowing, some of the water would be diverted to power an alarm bell on the outside of the building and trip the fire alarm circuit.
For 20 years the system sat. Finally a new inspector from the government fire department came around an noticed it. "Hey, where's the annual inspection tag for this?" Cue an explanation that it hadn't been touched in twenty years.
A test was scheduled and they found the diversion valve had failed. Much scrambling around to replace a very old and obsolete valve. Regular yearly inspections were scheduled. The following year, the building was demolished.
I may have told this before - apologies to fellow veteran commentards if I have.
Some contractors had been brought in to do some work on the computer room. Their work involved some heavy hammering work. Some of this was quite close to the BRB and duly triggered it off. Cue the familiar sphincter tightening and loosening followed by lots of frenetic running around and shouting till everything had come back to a state resembling normal.
As a side observation, I do wonder if kit in those older days was more tolerant of such unexpected outages compared to now. Where I work now has all its hardware in a dedicated data centre with resilient this that and everything. Would the modern rackmount stuff come back with as little complaint as was experienced in those (not really) halcyon days?
We had a room housing various systems which used to get mysteriously powered off at random times. It turned out that the switch on the ank of sockets was directly in line with the handle on the inside of the door and if you opened it while carying stuff, either by backing against t, or pushing it with your foot the handle hit the switch with just enough force t break the contanct without the switch latching over fully. A strategically positioned door stop eventually fixed the problem.
We have a similar, if much less troubling, switch in our kitchen. Open the refrigerator door, let it swing gently against the wall, and a couple of seconds later, the exhaust fan spins up. The slight pause before it's really making noise greatly enhances the disconnect of cause & effect, and the moment of 'what is that noise now?'
Back when my sister was in College, they were expanding the labs.
The expansion involved buying all the neighbouring houses (dense urban area), tearing down the backyard walls, and each house becomes a new lab. Use the kitchen facilities to your advantage; the "labs" come equipped with independent water supply, power... despite not being England, they kept the homes front facade, and you could not tell it was a lab inside.
However, the electronic equipment draws a bit extra power than home circuits can handle.
Cue Sparky.
Every single piece of equipment that could not handle 220V had a blown fuse the next week. TVs, monitors, PCs, fridges, all kept chugging because they can handle anything from 85V to 250V these days. Only the expensive gear that had manual switches for voltage selection in power supplies went up, things like ECGs and specialist lab gear, the real posh vintage stuff.
Anyway, she asked me for a ride to do extra work on Saturday, bus service would be out at 9pm, so I go there to pick her up, and she tells me about this stuff. As we are leaving and turn the lights off, I notice sparks coming out of the sockets.
"This is odd" I mention. The sparky left a working bag with a voltmeter behind, since they were not done, so I take a measure at the fixture. Lights back on, it said 110V. Fine. But turning off the lights, because sparks, I measure again to find 220V.
How do you manage to make sockets that go from 110 to 220 as you flick the lights is beyond me. "I found your problem right here" I tell her. The kicker is, most of the gear would blow up AGAIN if they plugged everything back and turned off the lights, which was bound to happen at the end of every day.
Saved her college a couple thousand bucks.
Quite likely the bright spark(y) was trying to wire things so a second light switch could also turn off the lights, like in a stairwell. However it looks like he switched the opposite phase onto the neutral. Why this would affect the wall sockets is another collosal blunder. Somewhere there was an open neutral. As long as there was a ground things would work sorta ok. A ground fault interrupter would pop immediately, so likely there wasn't one.
Not only did you save the University thousands of dollars, but maybe some lives.
I think I've mentioned this before - we had a PDP/11 with 32KW of core memory and the rest semiconductor. Some decorators pushed the big red button, and when we turned the power back on the system continued running, since the operating system was all in core, but the user processes died one by one as most of them were in semiconductor memory.
Not quite the same, but in terms of clicks, whilst I was at school (probably aged about 11), I managed to accidentally set off the school fire alarm and everybody had to evacuate - we'd been lined up in a corridor to go out to games, slowly moving down it (I seem to remember they were inspecting football boots or something to make sure the studs were safe). Whilst queueing I'd been gently rocking my head back and forth for no particular reason.
Unfortunately, little did I know they'd managed to install a fire alarm break glass call point at perfect height for my head, and as I shuffled down, I ended up directly in front of it - I rocked my head back, heard a 'click', followed immediately by the fire alarm bell sounding...
Fortunately I didn't get in to trouble for it (I did own up and explain), and I think afterwards that particular call point had a plastic cover added that had to be lifted up before it could be set to avoid a repeat ;)
My 6th form college had a sports hall built and the climbing wall had a fire exit in the middle with a fire alarm next to it. All the pupils were sensible and managed to not use it as a foothold; however, one of the teachers did stick her foot in it (figuratively and literally)
Oddly enough they put a cage around it not long afterwards
When my father was the head of a UK Comprehensive school (pupils from 11 to 18 years old) he had by law to organise a test emergency evacuation at least once per year. Of course with pupils smoking cigarettes they would occasionally set off the alarms anyway. So one year they had rather a lot of evacuations. The next year he decided not to bother with planned emergencies and just let the nature of delinquent youth take its course. Result - No emergency evacuations. Sometimes you just cannot win.
I used to look after equipment in the tallest building in our town.
To gain access to it you had to get the lift to the top floor then walk up some stairs into a very dark room with a light switch to the right in the dark.
Unfortunately the telco who also had equipment up there decided to put their main shutoff switch close to this switch.
I may of on occasion flicked the wrong switch.
I know this because when I returned I noticed the shut off switch had been moved far away from the light switch and no longer was easy to confuse in the dark for the light switch.
Doesn’t matter really, it was a poor design and layout - something that probably should have been recognised long before it was implemented, although it possibly was but the lowly engineer was ignored by the ‘designers’ and ‘architects’, because, well, what do they know?
Personally, I’d have hit the ‘wrong’ button, every…single…time, just to make a point!
But when I was a wee lad I had a part-time job at a burger flipping place. I was warned in very strenuous and serious terms to NEVER pull the emergency fire suppression handles unless the store was burning down around me because it would require them to throw out all the food in the place, shut it down for multiple days to clean up and then recharge the system. I was told that someone's apron once caught on the tab and activated it, which resulted in them looking for new employment shortly after.
Well, me I have done it.
Many many moons ago as an apprentice I used to work in a "fabulous" factory that made that brown packing Amazon so love to box up your item in the largest box possible.
In that said factory, there was an old sump pump, that would happy suck out and dump is contents into a process drain. This sump pump only liked water, and whenever there was a build up of sludge it would trip out the thermal overload. This required someone with a hose to dilute the said sludge and reset the thermal trip. This box the thermal trip was housed in was an IP rated box with a nice door. This door however would open onto the main Panic Stop for "most" of the process. Duly into what felt to be the 5th reset of the shift due to some production issues I swing the door open, and yes the loud noise that was present seemed to dissipate in my haste and grumblings I managed to stop the whole process and drives, but not the pumps feeding the machine. Oh what I mess, and it took them around 2hrs to get going again, This though, resulted in the operatives taking more care, and actually diluting the sump before it became a problem. My name was mud a few days though ;)
memories........ the bad ones
The company I worked for a long long time ago decided on "corporate rebranding" to enliven our rather scruffy appearance.
Paint colours were considered.... new overalls, t shirts, sweat shirts all colour coordinated to got with the new paint job, however all the machinery had to be repainted too...
For us CNC pilots, it wasn't too bad.. at least the painters managed not to paint over the computer screens... however , in the precision grinding bay it was a very different story.
Hand dials, the digital displays all painted over, and the rather precise mating surfaces that the grinders moved over were de-greased and painted over.
Took us 2 weeks to undo the damage and resume production.....
Luckily that mangler only lasted another few months before being rightfully booted for being a wasteful prick... to be replaced by a horay henry fresh from private schooling/oxford.... and hes another very long story.....
WARNING - NOT SAFE For People of a sensitive or strong religious disposition.
ASIDE - Flocks
Your reference to use of 'branding' to mean with an iron reminded me of this: Every time I hear a priest talk about 'my flock' or 'the Good Shepherd', I want to remind them that sheep are fleeced, butchered, cooked and eaten, often by the shepherd. (Flocks of geese, or this time of year, turkeys, are plucked, ...). Try talking Bible stories in sheep farming communities and you will get a whole new perspective*.
OK, let the downvotes roll.
*Gervase Phinn wrote some quite amusing memoirs about his time as a school inspector in Yorkshire where the children could often tell exactly the breed of any sheep pictured, unless it was a 'generic' sheep image, then they were stumped.
I was once involved in an EU funded project that installed learning centres round SE Scotland in various small businesses, libraries and universities. We would put in cabling, PCs, network and a server.
One of the locations was a University in Edinburgh. Their "server room" was a basement and their cabinets were a row of dexion racking. I was pointed to a gap where I needed plonk the server. To plug in all the cabling, I had to maneuver down a gap between the racking and the wall to get to the back of the server. About half way along my passage down the wall, I felt on ominous click against my backside. Some genius had mounted a PDU on the racking upright, with a great big rocker switch that I had manage to switch off with my arse. Another quick push turned it back on, then I did the needful and promptly departed. Just as I was leaving there was a puzzled question from one of their sysadmins "What is going on with the DNS?".
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