Zoomup  One of the joys of having a website is that you get totally random phone calls and end up being surprised yourself who you end up working for.

Last year having been and done a job many miles away from home I ended up in the evening at a house locally installing a main earth conductor and earth rod as well as rejigging the RCD protection on behalf of the contractors replacing the gas main pipe work in a street of houses built in the 1940’s.

When they removed the existing metal gas supply pipe the gas meter and everything else in the house that was supposed to be earthed was live at 240 volts, so turned off the electricity in addition to having already turned off the gas.

My Megger MFT1741 could not get a loop reading with the gas pipe disconnected and the RCD would not trip under test, as there wasn’t an earth path.

A gas engineer stayed with me and only turned the gas back on and recommissioned the gas boiler after I had handed the customer a certificate to say I had installed an earth rod and conductor then tested everything.

The gas contractor transferred the payment to me the following morning saying they budgeted for such eventualities.

It is all very well you will make an installation safe if the customer agrees, but in reality customers don’t actually know what the issues and dangers are, so sometimes like the gas network operator contractors you have to be proactive and just get on with things.

Indeed Sparkingchip. I advised the customer of the situation and she said that the new consumer unit and new E.V. charging point were to be installed within two weeks and she would wait for that. I could not proceed. I noted the dangerous situation on my invoice to cover myself.

Z.