Here's a real beaut for you guys.
One of our faultsmen from work got called out to a local church last Sunday, with the complaint that there was no power in half of the building.
One of the phases was missing on the submain that fed the "new" addition to the building, that happened back in the late 1990's.
He happened to get the thing working again, but went for a walk around the building to see what could have taken out a phase, he walked around the building and happened to see what was in the pic below.
I had a look in passing yesterday, and told him it was a water pipe.
I touched the thing to see what it was, there was a crackling that came from where it enters the building, via that metal air vent behind the bush and sure enough the phase had gone out again.
Turns out this pipe is a 3 Core + Neutral Screened 16mm2 PVC cable.
What concerns me the most about this, is the fact that a qualified electrician may have installed the cable in this manner.
Here it is:



Not good at all!.

Probably some guy doing his church a "favor" by installing that mess, probably free labor on some Sunday afternoon and he wanted to get it done, go home, and have a drink. Really sad that anyone in the electrical trade would lack the professional pride to do a hack job like that.
looking at that picture again, that cable's in a perfect spot to get weed-whacked once that little garden patch gets overgrown

As a side note, shouldn't your faultsman have done a little more work to locate the fault that caused that phase to fail? If something caused a new feeder to a building like that to blow a fuse/breaker then there is obviously a problem somewhere...

-Will

If that PVC goes down the rain-drain (sewer?), where does it come out? Tip of the iceberg, I think.

Looks like they really do like to "earth" their services in NZ