I've been working for an electrical company for three weeks now, and last Friday, when we thought work for that thay was over my mate rceived a phone call from the secretary. "The bakers guild lost power to some office sockets and lights after plugging in a vac!" Well, seemed to be easy. The house had lots of subpanels added, so we thought they had just been looking in the wrong panel. Got there (really nice, it's great to be in an 18. century brick building when it's baking hot outside!!!), opened the correct panel... all breakers up. Cripes. Started checking various Neozed fuses, all good. Looked for a subpanel where that circuit could have been fused. Nothing. So we figured it was time to start tracing the circuit. Opening the first box showed us a mess of mostly black PVC and cloth wires almost popping out of the overstuffed box, only a few choc blocks, mostly twisted and taped splices. Checked a few connections by unwrapping the tape and holding the Duspol up to the wires, all good. Second and third box: same game. Fourth box: looked like only cloth wires, no PVC at all. My mate up on the ladder started pulling the wires out of the box when I suddenly heard several loud "pop" noises and saw the sparks flying inside the box. His only comment: "Got it!" Using needle nose pliers now he proceeded to get the old wires out and found a completely cooked neutral splice. The once grey PVC wire that had been spliced to the cloth wire was black for at least 5cm, the end bare, the wooden box showed signs of either scorching or at least smoke from the burning PVC.
Taped the wires, put in a strip connector (choc block) and put the cover back on. At some point all that will have to be rewired, but right now they're refusing to do so. Some circuits for computers have been added in surface trunking, everything else is a mix of roughly 1900 to 1970.
