ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Irish Diazed panel

the most annoying thing i've come across here is where painters paint right over flush fitting phone sockets!

They have a little flap on the front but if you paint it it won't lift up when you push a plug in!

I've seen BS1363 sockets painted too.

I saw a house once where somebody painted an entire bedroom in a kind of magenta color.

And I do mean everything. They painted right over the radiator and its valves, the door knobs, the window frames and handles, and every switch and socket in the room!

When I moved into my present flat I had to clean the sockets from paint to insert the plug. The painters had covered the earth pins with so much paint you just couldn't get the plug in.

At that point it's probably just easier to replace the sockets. More expensive, yeah...but at least you don't have sockets where water-based paint has leaked inside the sockets and rusted the contacts out.

That's what happened with the old two-pin sockets in my flat. They had so many coats of paint (probably 50 years worth) that in some cases you couldn't shove a plug in. If you could shove iti in, it would not make contact in some cases. And when I went to remove them, I noticed the housings were cracked and came out in pieces!!!

Fortunately the system is grounded (through the metal sheathing on the cables) and I was able to replace them all with three-pin sockets. Otherwise I would have had to replace them with new 2-pin sockets....yup...they're still made for replacement use.

At least you can get replacable fronts for some of them nowadays to match your decor. It discourages people from painting!

>It discourages people from painting!

It's not the D-I-Ys who are the problem, it's the tradespeople in this case!