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From: "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: electrical deaths
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2024 02:42:37 +0100
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On 2024-12-03 00:09, Joe Gwinn wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Dec 2024 22:44:53 +0100, "Carlos E.R."
> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On 2024-12-02 22:17, Joe Gwinn wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2 Dec 2024 11:35:41 -0800, Joerg <news@analogconsultants.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 12/1/24 9:59 AM, Joe Gwinn wrote:
>>>>> On Sat, 30 Nov 2024 14:24:11 -0800, Joerg <news@analogconsultants.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>
>> ...
>>


>>> I have many such stories, but this will do for now.
>>>
>>> And I bet that Europe also has its heart-stopping stories.
>>
>> Not a dangerous one.
>>
>> The lights in the garden in my father's beach place were connected, the
>> neutral to one current limiter, the live to another one. The result was
>> weird: the residual-current device (RCD or RCCB or GFCI) of the house
>> (here the entire house must be protected by one) triggered at half past
>> six in the morning, every morning.
>>
>> The electrician was baffled. He found out that the station switched the
>> transformer one notch at that hour, but why would that cause the GFCI to
>> trigger nobody could imagine. Finally he found the crossover, and the
>> thing stopped happening.
> 
> Crossover?

I don't know how to call it. He found that the live was coming from one 
circuit breaker, and the neutral from another. Of course, everything 
worked, the lamps were connected to the neutral and the live, continuity 
tests say "right", but... two breakers. And the GFCI reacted, somehow.

> 
> 
>> On that same place, a cable entered a certain tube with one colour and
>> exited a different colour.
> 
> So there was an inline splice, which is forbidden here.  All splices
> must be accessible for repair.

It is forbidden here too!

Not only that, but the same cable was one colour on one end, and a 
different colour on the other end, so impossible to trace the cables 
from junction to junction box. The electrician that found this out was 
astonished. I guess he wasted days figuring out what was going on.

If the guy had used cables of the same colour, nobody would have noticed.

> 
> There was a You-Tube couple in Kiev, Ukraine that made a good income
> showing their home-improvement and boat-building stories and methods,
> up until when the Russians invaded in 2022.  Anyway, the guy did his
> own electrical work, and happily made connections buried in walls, his
> trick being that he arc welded the copper wires being connected - this
> connection was not going to fail at any current level that didn't melt
> the wires as well, so what difference could it make?  I see his point,
> but the US electrical safety authorities probably would not.

The house I am living at, has some cables directly embedded in the 
mortar. This is forbidden, but wasn't at the time. The correct procedure 
now is to place plastic tubing inside the walls and the mortar, and then 
drive the cables inside the tubing. The cables can be replaced when needed.


> 
> 
>> Turned out that the installation had been done by three different
>> electricians, each not knowing what the previous one intended or did.
> 
> Yeah.  That kind of problem is at the root cause of many bad
> accidents.
> 
> 
>>> PS:  I do prefer the Euro-style closed terminals that work for
>>> stranded and solid wire.  They are allowed in the US, but not all that
>>> common outside of industrial sites.  One big advantage is that they
>>> take far less volume than wire-nuts and the like.
>>>
>>> .<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob-and-tube_wiring>
>>
>> Oh! I had seen the article time ago, I had forgotten.
> 
> I don't miss those days.
> 
> I have many Baltimore and Washington, DC, stories, where there are
> lots of transient tenants and skinflint to rapacious landlords.
> 
> And a few good landlords.  One of may many apartments had a new
> landlord with a building that was overrun with cockroaches.  We
> complained to no avail.  One day I caught an immense cockroach (50mm
> long) and brought it to the landlord (a lawyer), who was working on
> something nearby.  His eyes widened - he had never seen one *that* big
> - and stammered that I had certainly brought the evidence.  He said
> that he had an exterminator on contract.  I pointed out that there is
> no way that critter could have gotten so big if the exterminator was
> doing his job, even sporadically.  He allowed that this was true. Next
> week, the apartment building smelled like a refinery, and there were
> paper signs the exterminator had been busy.  The landlord was being
> cheated by the exterminator.

Ah...

-- 
Cheers, Carlos.