Wago Lighting Connectors

[MikeJhn]

If you are not an electrician and not on a competant persons scheme then all your work would have to be inspected at your cost which I believe would be prohibitive, so the competant persons schemes are forced upon you. There are a lot of electricians that are time served and fully qualified that look at the domestic installer as just DIY'ers because they do lack that understanding you gain through academia.

Again not trying to start an argument, but it seems there is some confusion about what is legally required.

Inspected by whom and to what end? Most professional domestic electricians call these scheme's, Scams and try to avoid them, indeed most I know have resigned from them after paying the exorbitant fees for a number of years for no benefit.

An electrician does not have to be a member of a competent persons scheme to offer their services, they just have to be competent.

There is no such thing as a fully qualified domestic electrician, there is no legislation or professional body that an electrician can be a member of and no legally binding regulations that they must follow, only the made up out of thin air "EIT Regulations" which have not been legislated, passed through Government, given Royal assent or passed into law by the Secretary of State.

Some of the awful electrical work/practice's I have seen will not change until there is a recognised professional body responsible for the standards required and not the convenient made up ones that appear out of thin air to jump on the bandwagon of the miss-placed competence scheme's.

The additional problem (my own Association/Institute included) is the agenda of the Board to increase membership above all else, I have first hand knowledge of this.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I think rules and regulations should be law and not merely advisory therefore be totally unambiguous, therefore not needing any "interpretation" - indeed, interpretation shouldn't be possible.

 

[John Brown]

I think rules and regulations should be law and not merely advisory therefore be totally unambiguous, therefore not needing any "interpretation" - indeed, interpretation shouldn't be possible.

While I agree with the spirit of what you say, in a world where language mutates and evolves, to the extent where "literally" can now be used to mean "virtually", there will always be room for interpretation. Stick to Latin, maybe?

 

[Spectric]

they just have to be competent

How do they prove that? If you take the electrical engineers route then you get experience by working for a firm whilst doing the apprenticeship and formal qualifications from day release. If you don't want to become a fully qualified electrician and just want to wire domestic then you to become a domestic installer and need to prove compentancy by registering with someone like NICEIC. It is along the same lines as gas safe, Quote

Registered Competent Person Electrical is a single point of reference for consumers seeking a domestic electrician to carry out work in their home. The register contains a comprehensive list of all full scope Part P registered electricians in England and Wales.

All domestic electrical installers registered with NICEIC are listed on Registered Competent Person Electrical. They can be found at www.electricalcompetentperson.co.uk and are authorised to use the logo alongside their Competent Person Scheme Operator’s logo. This is to ensure consumers have just one intuitive logo to recognise but are still able to access robust support, such as the work quality guarantee.

Registered installers are encouraged to promote this dual logo to customers to verify their competence and raise awareness of the single point of reference.

Inspected by whom and to what end?

If a person undertakes electrical work and they are not on a competancy scheme like NICEIC then either a qualified electrician or someone with the part P must perform a test and inspection in order to certify the job, this is mandatory and BC needs the certs.

 

[MikeJhn]

Agree, but the Part P registration and certificate are the responsibility of the home owner. Strange world!

Just to clarify, Part P is a regulation not a qualification.

And you don't have to be a member of any scheme to carry out an inspection.

 

[deema]

It’s a very strange world. You will find my signature on the certificate of conformance for many different types of electrical test equipment made up to about twenty years ago and used to commission everything from power stations down to private dwellings and yet despite being a Chartered Electrical and Electronics Engineer who certified the instruments measure what is needed to issue the certificates I cannot certify the wiring in my own home. I once could, but then it was changed which was ridiculous.

 

[Valhalla]

they just have to be competent.

Define competency in an electrical installation context.....I'll wager that for every positive there will be many negatives

 

[MikeJhn]

Define competency in an electrical installation context.....I'll wager that for every positive there will be many negatives

Someone who can wire a plug correctly, first time.

 

[cmoops2]

Correct ! (unlike gas for which the law demands registration) ....

 

[MikeJhn]

A Local Authority Building Control have no authority to insist that anyone issuing a Part P notification or an EICR is a member of a scheme, in my experience they are not interested in an EICR as in most case's they do not have the experience/expertise to interoperate the results.

 

[Woody Alan]

in my experience they are not interested in an EICR as in most case's they do not have the experience/expertise to interoperate the results

I would have to agree with that. I used to do electrical wiring industrially as part of equipmment installation until quite a few years ago the company split the equipment installation and electrical connection apart. I would consider myself competent and wired out my own extension on the house and used the firms contractors to test inspect the installation and at the same time do a full test on the whole house(because it was free). They found one earth fault on the existing part on a light(dis earth) BC were not in the slightest bit interested in the report on the whole thing, just the single piece of paper saying part P.

I get frustrated with the whole competency thing as an individual who takes these things seriously I even bought the regs book and researched to make sure I was up to date. There are many horror stories of new builds with faulty /incorrectly wired electrics. A simple example was the power extension to an outbuilding with exported earth fed by 100mA breaker at the house to protect the cable and 30Ma consumer in the building the tester was surprised at the armour only being earthed at the house because most electricians incorrectly earth both ends. (seperate earth core for board) it's a lottery with electricians I've found everyone you ask a tricky question you get a different answer. Mostly some of these errors are not unsafe as such but I like to know these things and think that makes me competent but how do you prove it .

 

[MikeJhn]

Yes you are not supposed to export an earth to an outbuilding, the outbuilding should be TT'd.

 

[Woody Alan]

Yes you are not supposed to export an earth to an outbuilding, the outbuilding should be TT'd.

I knew somebody would come up with that response to illustrate my point. You are partly correct in your statement in that it is a method and probably the first go to especially if the building has metal infrastructure, but not entirely correct as it was approved by my electrician colleague with NICEIC when we were unable to get a satisfactory test by local earth.
This is one of the reasons I rarely post on forums anymore because I cannot be bothered with having to justify the reality to people stuck in their bubble of perceived knowledge whose first step is to attack rather than phrase something like " Oh that's unusual, why didn't you use the TT method?" . I'll let you have the last word as I'm sure you will be offended or feel the need to support your statement but at the end of the day it was approved at installation and then approved by qualified electricians on a full documented test.
As I said as many different viewpoints as there are electricians, not neccessarily all wrong.

 

[MikeJhn]

Where do you get the idea from that someone attacked you?

 

[pe2dave]

Interesting point..

I had a look and the site says you need to accept non-necessary cookies to view 3rd party content (all YouTube, I guess) - would that be a requirement of the Quickwire site linking to YouTube? I don’t know.

Until very recently, I have been blasé about accepting all cookies, but mostly now try to limit to necessary ones, except when I’m in a rush…

Cheers

Better view, incl regulations. See this guy. Very clear.

 

[Spectric]

it's a lottery with electricians I've found everyone you ask a tricky question you get a different answer.

Sounds like electricians would make good politicians .

Yes you are not supposed to export an earth to an outbuilding, the outbuilding should be TT'd.

But that does depend on the type of supply to the main building. A PME supply is the one that causes most issues, in such a case it is easier to only supply live and neutral with an earth rod for the outbuilding which also allows a smaller CSA armoured cable. This becomes even more important when you have extraneous conductive parts, ie metal framed buildings. Why is this important, well if and it is a big if that the neutral to your property becomes open circuit you have the following potential synario if there are issues with bonding / earthing arrangements. Power can still be supplied to any loads, no current flows due to open circuit and it also makes the neutral live, which because it is connected to the earth will also make the main earthing terminal live and therefore your metal framed building, hence the importance of bonding to ground.

the tester was surprised at the armour only being earthed at the house

I would suspect he was more domestic than industrial and why he was surprised. When we installed large four core armoured cables, three phase and neutral we would run a 75mm CSA single protective conductor (earth) along with it and only bond the cables armour at the supply end, galvanised steel does not make for a good conductor.

 

[Woody Alan]

"I would suspect he was more domestic than industrial and why he was surprised......only bond the cables armour at the supply end."

Well I think it was actually most installs he sees, when testing, are earthed both end of armour when they shouldn't be. Also using armour as earth (as opposed to earthing armour) which hasn't been acceptable for some time (if ever).
I could never reconcile in my head what the difference between a non metallic outbuilding supply and a portable appliance e.g. hot tub is in respect of exported earth, in terms of the type of fault you describe. The same conditions would apply wouldn't they ? there is no requirement to TT a hot tub, but both could be 30 metres from main dwelling.

 

[Spectric]

portable appliance

Another strange terminology in the regs, portable suggest that it is portable but hand dryers fixed to a wall and connected by a flex to a FCU are classed as portable and so are some very large welding sets that you are not moving anytime soon.

 

[Jonm]

Used these for the first time a few months back, rewiring the new upstairs lighting circuit. A real time saver. Biggest problem was the loft flooring - 8 x 4 x 3/4 chipboard nailed down with annular nails ... all under 12 inch of fibreglass insulation roll ... messy hard work
Beware of the rookie mistake I made. Always been used to using choc blocks and when I finished up for the day I was very tired and had a bare cable end and without thinking I secured each wire in its own hole in a 3 way wago block, forgetting they were all inter connected ..... that tested the breakers nicely with impressive visual and audio effects and woke me up very quickly .... in a split second I knew exactly what I'd done.
Don't play with wiring when tired !

I made the same mistake, felt a right silly person.