Bodge jobs by electricians. Well, let's be honest, they're probably not even electricians. Because how many times have you heard someone say electrics? It's easy, it's three easy wires. How can you go wrong? And yes, these are the type of people that will give it a go. They'll give it a go themselves to think, yeah, it is easy. But then when it catches fire, it denies all knowledge. It weren't me, I didn't touch it. And these guys are the Billy Bodgers. The world is full of them. They're always going to be people that are Billy Bodge. They just want to get a quick job done. The people that sort of bodge something, they think they're going to save a few quid, but they'll spend a lot more money once it goes wrong. I find it amazing that people, they do they just sort of to save a couple of quid, rather than calling a qualified electrician or a qualified tradesman in a lot of circumstances, that they'll just give it a go themselves and they'll budget up and yeah, it'll work. It'll work for a little while, and it might have even worked for a year, but it's just that one time. That one time that that fire happens, you could kill somebody. So in this podcast, I'm going to tell you some of the outright dangerous insulations that I've come across over my time as an electrician, along with the 02:00 A.m. Call from the Police, which turned out to be a bit of a sorry story, shall we say, toolbox talks for electricians, helping electricians reduce stress, gain back time and earn more money. 1.2s Welcome back once again to another episode of Toolbox Talks For Electricians I'm your host Ben Poulter and over the years as working as an electrician you've seen all sorts more lightly well, myself, I have seen a lot of different circumstances where you think why'd you do it like that? Or what's happened here, what's gone on? It opens your mind up to, well, maybe so, sort of how people live. I've even found a needle under the floorboards in somebody's house where basically I was meant to root my cables. I'm going to be sitting there with my hands fumbling in, trying to find the end of the cable to pull in a new cable towards, I don't know, for Sockets lighting or anything. Well, that job you can imagine, got stopped straight away because I'm not running around in someone's house with needles under the floorboards. Well, how the hell they get a needle under the floorboard? They must have picked it up to hide it or I don't know if they've done it there, they've more likely done it somewhere else, so I don't want to be touching any needle. So, obviously that job got called off and, yeah, I didn't go back. But Billy Bodgers, as we call them, it's normally the people that think that, yeah, being electrician is easy, so they can do it themselves. And a lot of people they do in their own properties. They give it a go. I've been to installs where customers say that maybe an electrician he did do this job before you've came well, would you called me up to come and fix it? Why didn't you call the electrician that wrecked it the third, 1st time? But there's two sides of the coin sort of thing there, because maybe they have had electrician in and seen the work is done and thought, I'm not going to call you back, to be honest. But then there's other scenarios where the customer will say to you, yeah, it's rooted through here, through this floorboard and up and around there, and then joined here, and you think, yeah, it wasn't electrician, was it? You've give this a go yourself may haven't you? Just please tell me the truth. Sometimes it's easier to know the truth of what you've gone wrong, what cable you used? Because there's no point. A lot of people, sometimes they think a cable is a cable. Well, there's a lot of different sorts of cables. Double insulated. There's one mil, there's two. There's all different grades of cable for different scenarios, different environments. And if someone's got three bits of cable and they join them all together, how do they know that they're all the same size? 1.4s You don't. They just think it'll do the job. And maybe it did do the job, but it's when we get a call and we find out, yeah, it doesn't work and it's melted, that it didn't do the job, did it? And the thing is that I'm all for customers, maybe giving the electrical jobs a go, maybe changing a plug or changing a washing machine and where they wire it into a few spur or something like that, that's fine. But as long as you're confident that you know that you're doing it right, you're 100%. There's no room for failure. Things can go wrong quite easily with electrics, and then there's a worse kind of people as well that actually think they have done it 100% right. I've done this before and it worked for 100 years in my last property, but it's not right. This is the thing. It might have worked last time for 100 years. Plug in different appliances these days and things maybe pull a little bit more juice, or maybe you plugged in three more heaters into this circuit because you thought, yep, it could handle it. It's just sometimes if you're not 110% confident that you know what you're doing, don't do it. 1.1s It's the amount of times where I've been to pills houses and they said, yeah, we just want a supply to our shed, or we want to put a washing machine in our garage. You can use this cable that's really thick, but that is 20 mil thick. Yeah, but inside the cause, it's not, it's maybe a 2.5 cable or even a one mil cable for lighting. It's still wide armored cable. You've got to take into consideration the armored, the sheath, the double insulation. It's just sometimes it's knowing what you're looking at that you're not going to be able to use that for your new hot tub that you're putting at the end of the garden. It's not going to be able to work. It'll ruin your cable and you end up having to rewire your whole lights in your garden as well. It's this sort of knowledge that, well, obviously electricians have, but I suppose this is why there is over 20,000 electrical fires in domestic premises in the UK alone. That's a lot of fires. Maybe not all of them end up being fatal, but, yeah, even a fire, I wouldn't want an electrical fire. It can turn into something else, especially if you're not there. If you're there and something happens, it's fine, you go, hang about, that's getting hot, I smoke it away, you can turn it off. But what if you're not there and you've got maybe your washing machine on a timer and that plug socket not really capable enough for it. Because washing machines these days, they have a heating element in there as well. They do draw a bit of juice. Even a tumble dryer. Tumble dryers are the worst. If you got a tumble dryer on that pulls a shed load of juice and that's going to it's a heating element, it's going to cause fire. This is the thing, it's how it works. You got to plug it into a decent socket. But I don't know, maybe people don't think about that. Electricians think about that because they know the risk, they know the dangers. There's an area where I live. 1.3s And there's common for these 1930s houses to have a brick built shed at the end of the garden. And they're lovely. Like for your shed, you can put your tools and stuff in. I remember I used to own a house and I strung a motorbike. I've been there once when I was doing it up so I could lay it all out. It was like it was insulated and well, it was brick, it was safe and secure, so it was good. But I've been told that maybe they use these they used to use these built sheds at the end of the garden for the coal. They used to have coal in there when they were younger because that's how old the houses are. We didn't have electricity then, so they ain't got supplied to them, a lot of them. But then what people want to do, they want to convert them. They convert them into playrooms, into maybe a garden bar or sometimes a studio for maybe when they're recording their music. A lot of people have done that, where they got the drum kit out the back, that soundproof it, and they put the drum kit at the back of the garden. So obviously the kids can learn to play the drums or guitars or whatever they want to do. But a lot of people change them into something better. Because it's not just a normal shed, it is a brick built shed. However, to get a good supply from the main fuse board, which in these houses, all the mains are at the front of the house. You may be seeing them houses where you've got your doorway, you knock on the door and the fuse board is just above your head. They're right at the front of the house. All the main cables have looped in and out for that houses because they're terraced houses. That's what the house I was looking for. They're terraced houses with a supply at the front, but then the garden sheds at the back. So to get a cable from there. 1s You've got to go straight through the floorboards. You can't go unless there's a lucky you've got an alleyway. You can go out and straight down the alleyway, which some of the houses also have, but if you haven't, you've got to go into the floorboards out to the back of the house. More likely that's taking up the floorboards in the bathroom, that you've more likely tiled. So people don't tend to do it. They think we'll just come off a socket and they do. They come straight out of the kitchen that's maybe at the back of the house, out of a socket, clip it all over the gate where that goes out, where you take your wheelie bin out and probably do it in twin and fibers, twin and skin as well because that's obviously cheap. So they get a bit of twin and skin. Get some clips and clip it all nice and neat all the way to the back of the shed. Just use a 2.5 mil cable as well because that was cheap and that's what people use for sockets. And what I want in the shed is a socket so people do it themselves. And obviously that twin and earth cable against the elements of outside. It's not an outdoor cable, you put it in the house. There's a reason like we use outdoor cables over time that twin and nerf cable gets brittle and tarnishes. It's not for laying around, it's not flexible, it's not for that position. You've got to get special cable for the right environment and so many people do this and I find that a lot of people, they run that supply strava socket in the kitchen and it works fine, it's spot on. It's maybe been like it all summer because all you've plugged into it is your loud speaker and maybe a little fridge that you've got a few beers in up in the shed. But it's not until the winter comes along where they think it's cold in there and the kids want to play in the den that I built in one of them little sheds. So they plug a heater in. 1.1s And you can guess what happens. A fire. It trips out, it burns, it maybe takes up that fence, that wooden fence that you clip that twinning skin to, because you're sitting there, you're plugged in two or three heat, you're sitting nice and warm for the kids. Well, yeah, it will be red hot after a little while. And this is when I get the call. I get the call to come around saying my cable melted going to my outside shed. Okay, who did it? Well, I did it myself. Well, why didn't you get electrician to do it? Well, he was going to charge me 500 pounds to put a socket in that shed. You wonder why? Because it wasn't going to catch fire if electrician did it. Sometimes. Well, luckily, the houses that I've been to, they haven't had a fatal accident. They haven't anyone died or anyone got hurt. Well, fingers crossed. This never happens. I'd rather that a little fire happens or no one gets hurt, basically, before they realize that. Yeah, you should spend the 500 pound, mate, because you've probably spent a grand on plastering the whole board out, the plastering the little shed out and maybe watertight in it, but you won't spend a decent amount of money. But the electrics. 1.3s And it's a sad truth. A lot of people do. They do realize, well, when it's too late, but especially at the moment, I do, I understand the cost of living is constantly going up, and we all need to maybe tighten up our budget a little bit and spend a little less and then maybe use a tumble dryer a little bit less. Boil the kettle with just enough water for that cup of tea, what you're boiling it for, or knock the heating down a little bit, just a couple of notches. You don't need it so cozy and warm, maybe, because it will save you a lot of money in the long run. But some people might look for maybe an alternative option where you can still use all these but use it for completely free, just bridge the meter out. 1.7s And this reminds me of a job that I attended once. I got a call from somebody I know that I've done, maybe done a little bit of work for before. He said, BEM the whole site, the caravan site, it hasn't got any electrics. So I was like, It must be something simple then. You might have had a power cut, but you didn't live far. So I'll pop round and then looking at the board, all the fuses were on and it looked fine. And I plugged my little tester in. You still got alive, you just lost a neutral. So what's happened? So we go to the main head and we have a look. All looks lovely and fine in there, but it's in like a brick beat built brick built building. There's some sockets there's probably about, I don't know, twelve caravans on this site and maybe two or three chalets as well. So they've got a few armored cables coming in, like ten mil armors, where they got a 63 amp supply going out. It's crazy. It's crazy overloaded to start with. But then it still had the fuse. It had the fuse that protected. If it pulled over 100 amps or it's probably a 60 amp cart refuse in there. I'll tell you why I didn't check in a minute, but there's a carry fuse in there and. 1.1s It would have blown the fuse long before it pulled too much. So, yeah, the ten mil supply, 63 amp supply would more likely fine to the chalets and that they had, which the mobile units. So really they should be plugged, plugged in on maybe a 32 amp commander or something. But that nevertheless but I was looking at it, but I looked round the back, I'll have a little look round the back, see what's going on, and you see a six mil armored coming out the back, burnt to ascenda, and it had gone straight into the back of the head on the bottom side of the fuse. One even fused. So there's no way that I could actually turn that off. Turn that one cable that's going out, that's basically gone into the back of the head. Someone's drilled into the back of the head, connected onto the live and neutral without going through the fuse. And it just baffles me to think, Agabat, they've got kids riding around on a push bike and they've got vans going in and out of there all the time. How is that not caught fire? How is that not blown up? Because it wouldn't blow the under damp views, it would go right back to the transformer. I just couldn't believe it. So obviously I had to explain to the guys there, I said, look, lads, somebody's done that, they know. Obviously someone knows who's done it, without a doubt, but somebody's done this and this is dangerous. I might be a qualified electrician, but I'm not interested in touching it. I'm not going to touch that. Whatever you need to call the electricity board. No, we'll pay you whatever you want. I said, okay, you can pay me whatever you want, but are you going to look after my family and children for the next 80 years? Wise, I should be alive in case I die from touching that, because that's what could potentially happen. Can't turn it off. If I start getting a shock on, that the marriage surf door not I'm going to get blown to smithereens. It's not RCD protected, it's high voltage. It needs someone 1s with more skills than me to be working live. I ain't interested. 1.5s And needless to say, I left there and never heard nothing else. I don't know what happened, but I'm assuming it didn't go over bang because I can see it from my house and I never saw any smoke going up. And it's difficult because you know what could potentially happen, knowing as an electrician how dangerous it is. Some people just don't think it's that dangerous because they've maybe never had a shock or never seen a potential fire or never had an accident with electrics, they're sort of flippant with it. They don't understand. The customer says to you, like, it's been lucky for years and it's been fine. It could be fine, it could be fantastic. It only takes one fault for that to go up in flames. And you won't get that fault again because you'll be dead. And this is the whole reason for electricians. Electricians know what cable size to put in. They know how to protect it, they know how to test it to make sure it's safe. And the reason we do this, because in case anything happens, like a fault or it overheats or something potentially happens, it's going to trip off. It's going to trip off and save someone's life. It's not going to catch a fire, it's not going to go faulty. And this is what people employ electricians to do. 1.2s I don't necessarily believe that people don't know this or they don't understand this, or maybe they don't think about that when they're doing this and connecting it up. They didn't get a shock. So they think electricians is easy now? No, you were lucky that day. You were more than likely lucky that you're not dead, mate. Whoever connected up to the back of that head, yeah, I would assume they're lucky they're not dead. There was a job I went to once this is a quick store worry. A job I went to once on a farm and some people had gone in there with an angle grinder and chopped off the mains just to take maybe two foot of copper. It's probably a couple of hundred quid weav of copper because it was a big size cable. But how the hell is there not a dead body there? I don't understand how they've done it, because I can't turn it off. It's from the mains. They left the head sitting in there live. How? Well, they're not dead, I don't know. But I do think that people must know how dangerous it is because they just well, it kills. Electricity kills it's all over the common knowledge that it kills. It's either that or people don't really want to pay for the work to be done because it is expensive. 1.1s It does take electrician maybe 1.3s five years in college and then all the experience that you gain over time, it takes that long. They can't be asked to learn that. Listen. That long. They can't be asked to pay someone for that knowledge. What's the point? I'm going to Billy Bodget myself and potentially die stupid. Or they've got something to hide. And in this next story, that's what I found out. 1.8s It was the early hours of the morning, say around two in the morning, I think I got a phone call and it was a phone call for a random number. I don't know why I answer it, but I answered it at two in the morning and it was Electricity Board asking me to attend a property because there'd been a fire and the Electricity Board had been called out because well, I think the fire ambulance and things not the ambulance, sorry, the rubigate the stuff for there as well. So they put it all out, but the electricity boss had been asked to put the head back on and obviously the Electricity Board, they'll more likely they'll put your head on, but they will not connect it up to your fuse board. That's where you need electrician. So I'm assuming that they've got well, they've gone on Google, haven't they? And they found that I'm the nearest buyer and thought, right, we'll give this one a ring. So they've given me a ring, foolishly answered, maybe answered the phone, 1.3s and the Electricity Board on the other end of the phone, they said to me, look, this family, they have children in the house and they really need the electricity back on as soon as possible, so could you come out and connect it up? Me being a nice person, I suppose, I said, yes, no worries. I thought, Well, I can charge a fortune because obviously this is going to be insurance as well, and I don't mind doing insurance jobs because, well, you can, you can charge what you want, it's a call out. So I went to go there and obviously you don't just dump it back in the board and go, There you go, mate, it's on, see you later. I wanted to know whether that property was safe, whether it had the rest of the circuits were safe enough to turn on, so at least you want to do at least an ear fault loop impedance on the actual circuit. Maybe if you can find the ender lines, perfect, but at least do something just to test that circuit safe. So I got the sockets bring main spot on, the lights in the house spot on, and the cooker circuit and the shower up says, yes, they're all fine. So I did good, but there's one circuit that I couldn't find coming out the board and I said, there's one circuit here, mate. To the customer, I said, there's one circuit that I can't find, I don't know what it is. I don't know whether it's an old circuit that was still connected because it was only the head that caught fire, which was on the outside of the house. On the inside of the house, the fusible was fine, so I could see all the circuits in there. It wasn't labeled. So as a customer, where does this one go? 2.1s But this is where I felt sorry for the guy a little bit, because obviously he had to tell me where it went, I needed to test it if he wanted it back on. It went to a board in the loft that fed other things and as soon as he opened the loft, you could tell what it fed. And obviously in that area in the house, it was pitch black. We had the fire brigade in there, we had the electricity board, and obviously police turn up for these scenarios as well. And it didn't end well for the poor old boy. They smelt it, they looked dump, it was gone. And thinking back, maybe this is why the whole reason that the electricity bulba called out, because he probably bridged the meter to maybe supply his grow in the loft while she was going, because it's quite a big grow. It was not bad side out size house. And yeah, he had a good grow up in the loft that I don't know whether electrician had put it in because it weren't bad standard, to be honest. The electrics for them sockets in that loft were quite well, I just had to disconnect it all, which I disconnected the one out the board, which fed up into the loft, and that was it. I left, really. I connected on the rest of the house and left. And I don't know, I never did get paid for that job because I'm assuming that the guy possibly did some time and, well, he must have had money to pay, because I drove by the next day and I saw that the police had a skip outside and they just emptied the whole house. There was plants galore and there's always a policeman standing there at the skip protecting it, because the area where it's in, I reckon lads would go by and just take them out. 1s But in reality, I hope that guy is maybe well, wherever he's sitting, wherever got a slap on the wrist or whether he got time, he's sitting there thinking, yeah, probably, I'm quite lucky. That could have ended worse. His children could have died in the house. A whole house could have went up. It was early, hours of the morning. Luckily he woke up and smelt it or seen the fire, because it could have been ten times worse, you could have died. And I do wonder sometimes times, these either. I'm not even going to call them electricians, I'm going to call them the Billy Bodgers. These guys that go around and do these jobs and think, yeah, I could make a quick buck. How do they sleep at night? In their head thinking, yeah, I've just Billy Bodged that up. It could catch fire. It could not catch fire, because normally people say, yeah, you can put this socket in, but I'm never going to plug a heater into it. Okay, yeah, but what if you sell the house next year and they plug two heaters into it? You didn't tell them that you couldn't plug two heaters into it. You've got to 1s do an installation for the worst case scenario. If someone does plug two tumble dryers in it or, I don't know, plug two heaters in it, you've got to make that fuse trip long before the cable melts and catches fire. I know for myself, if I may be working in a house that's being rewired while the people are living in it, which I hate doing, it's a nightmare. I wish to move out, but sometimes it happens. You've got to do a rewire with someone still living in it, so you've got to pack your kit away at night, you've got to get it all out of the way because maybe they've got kids in there and you don't want to faffle around with screwdrivers and hammers and chisels and things like that. So you got to pack it all away. But you've also got to put their floorboards down, because what if a kid's jumping around it's a young kid doesn't listen to his mum to say, right, be careful over them floorboards, you got to hammer them floorboards all the way back down. I always think about this when I do Matt Rear Wild with somebody living in there. Did I put all this back? Right? Is that kid going to fall down that hole? Is there's no cables hanging out? Because even though if there's a cable hanging out, I tried to take the end up, because I don't want kids to think it's all right to touch it's all right to touch that, because then they'll get in their head and then one day they might touch a live cable. I don't know, it's just a lot harder. And this is what I think about at night, this is why I don't leave any scenario dangerous, but like I say there's people out there, if they're offered 20 quid, to quickly do this Billy Bob's job. Yeah, they'll do it. And it's not worth it. It never, ever will be. Not for me, anyway, and it shouldn't be for you. And I expect for a lot of proper electricians that understand how electricity can kill, how easily it can kill and how important it is to have the installation right. I doubt that they'd do it either. It's the whole point of training to be electrician, to know your stuff. There's a reason you go to college. There's a reason you learn these things and you know these things. Or there's a reason that customers call you up to ask you it to start with. So we all put safe installations in. This is what we do as electricians to stop these things from happening. And these are the type of electricians that. I'm bringing together in a group on Facebook, just to let you know there's no Billy Bodgers, risky life dudes allowed in there at all. I'm not going to say you have to show your credentials as an electrician, but yeah, you can't do Billy Bodger, man. It's not worth it. I don't want to be around them people. So, yeah, billy Bodger is not welcome. So if it's not you, come over and join in in the group on Facebook, where we've got a shed load of giveaways to help people with their business and also some downloads and stuff like that, that will also help people in the business and advice as electrician. So come over and join on. Join in. Even so, until next time I'll see you again.