ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Condemnation of a Building?.

In New Zealand, we have system of self-certification where the Electrician who installs ANY new work more or less takes full responsibility for all of the wiring in the Installation (that's the way I read it as, anyway).
If we are not given any powers to Disconnect any unsafe work or at least make it safe, this system seems a wee bit unfair, as it seems like there is no safety net, where there may be a bad join lurking in a wall or other such place and you can't check ALL of the wiring in an Installation.

Whoever installs wiring here takes full responsibility for it as well. Back in the "olden days" (1970s and before), the PoCo employee would at least carry out a few basic checks before connection (earth continuity, insulation resistance, etc.) just to make sure nothing drastic was wrong.

They still have the right to refuse connection if they consider the installation to be dangerous, but most of the time now the attitude is "We don't care what happens on the load side of the meter."

Ranger,
So you guys have the Tree Police over there, too!.
Paul,
The same attitude about the load side of metering, existed here for a while.
I am reminded of an incident that occured at the Power Board when I first started my Electricians Apprenticeship, long story short, what happened was a Faultsman had just thrown the pole fuse back in, without bothering to Megger the Mains or anything.
And within a split second of this occuring, an almighty explosion came from inside the house and the guy ran into the house and the wallpaper was on fire and the switchboard panel was hanging out of the wall by the ends of the sub-circuit wires.
Turns out that the owner of the house had an Electrician in to run a new Mains cable (to replace old Steel Conduit) and the sparky had nicked the phase wire insulation of the Neutral Screened cable and this was touching the Neutral Busbar, effectively shorting out the Mains.
No-one had tested the Installation at all and the poor Faultsman wore it all!.
(how would you feel running into that?!)
I remember there was a very stern office memo(Photocopied and hand-delivered in them days)circulating at work, saying to the effect of: If you fail to test and damage occurs, better get your cheque-book out!.

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 08-16-2003).]

That's a pretty drastic demonstration of how a moment taken to test before energizing could save a lot of heartache.

Re trees, in the U.K. a local authority can put a "Tree Preservation Order" on individual trees if there's a compelling reason, and some areas are designated as conservation areas where you practically have to ask permission to sneeze, but otherwise you're free to chop down a tree on your own property if you so wish. In fact I believe that if the roots or overhanging branches of a tree on your property are posing a hazard or are causing damage to somebody else's property, the local council can order that you trim and/or remove said tree.

The idea of "dobbing in" your neighbors, as you would say down under, seems to be getting out of hand in some places. Didn't some city in California actually set up a hotline to report your neighbors for not buckling up?

That tree stuff is valid for the entire city. (Environment protection codes are state legislation, and Vienna is a state as well as a city). The ugly thing about that law is it was intended to keep unscrupulous construction companies from chopping down the last few trees in some areas of town. Now homeowners with about 20 Ailanthus trees in their 20m2 backyard are fined for cutting one of them down (never mind, as they're ailanthus there'll be 20 more of them within 3 weeks and after 10 years it's a full-grown tree) and the actual targets of the law are stiil chopping down entire woods in order to build ugly new apartment blocks.

We have a few weird peices of legislation here:

On the tree thing:

The City Council reserves the right to slap a little brass plate on any tree they deem to be important to the visual environment of the city. This includes 3 in our garden. You can't do anything to these trees without authorisation from the council.

Also, since the 1930s the ESB (PoCo) has had a full exemption from planning legislation and complete right of way over all property: private or publically owned. (within reason) This has been reviewed recently and is not quite as wide as it was.

This came about as during electrification schemes vast costs were added by endless objections to every pole.

It's worked fine as the ESB, a semi-state company since 1928, has been very thoughtful and generally been very environmentally concious.

However, it means that the ESB has right of way to run cables right over gardens, across farms etc as it sees fit provided it compensates for damage etc.

There is a full 3/4 layre appeals process...

Is this the same elsewhere?

For Sweden, yes, sort of. I don't know today, with all the Not In My Back Yard people around. The government want to introduce new laws to make legal action more difficult for these people.

OTOH, the railway agency have been rather agressive, demolishing houses even when the railway line was never built.

The ESB had unique powers though. Everything else here is subject to endless appeals and quite often to serious court cases and huge compensation claims. It's the main reason why we are taking forever to build motorways.

The ESB no longer has those powers either btw..