Electrical safety in ED houses

[jackangel]

Really, really sorry the following may appear so boring, but there are possibly huge safety implications.

Someone I know has a 100+ year old house in the area. Recently, having got an electrician in to do some work on a fault in the kitchen wiring, the earth into the house was discovered to be very dodgy.

Plumbing, central heating and the casings of big appliances are all earthed so that in the event of a wiring fault the current will ?run to earth? and trip out at the consumer unit rather than run through a person. With a dodgy earth, the person could share the current with possibly unfortunate results.

The kitchen wiring fault was repaired and an EDF engineer was called in. He confirmed the earth dodginess and insisted on turning off the power supply at the consumer unit for safety before he left.

Cutting a very involved story short, eventually the power company dug up the pavement and re-made the earth to the incoming service sheath. These engineers reckoned that the earth may never have been very good (or even existed!) on the electrical supply sheathing since the water pipes and gas pipes in the past were always metal and this provided convenient good earthing. Only the one house that reported the fault was treated by the engineers!

The house has a plastic incoming water pipe. The gas pipes are metal into the house, but inside (amazingly) there is a plastic tube which runs out under the street, invisible to the householder. Any effective earthing for the house from these two services has gone because of the modern use of plastics.

There was no indication that anything was wrong. But when the kitchen wiring fault happened, the electrician found all metal surfaces in the house were live! It is unknown how long the wiring fault had existed or how the occupants had escaped electric shocks.

Much of this area must have been converted to plastic pipe gas and water supply.

Can anyone with technical knowledge shed some light on this phenomenon?

Is it a real concern?

Is there an easy way to check if our home is affected?

[Huguenot]

Nothing boring about that JA - we renovated our otherwise completely run down house about 4 years ago, and all the above faults were found to exist. Electrical engineers in ED with any knowledge of local history will always make the above checks whenever they're working at any house.

Incidentally, we changed our incoming gas supply from metal to gas for safety reasons. Most in ED ars still metal.

The only easy way is to call out an engineer I'm afraid, although they don't have to be EDF.

[jackangel]

Thanks H.

Looks like only we two have a curious interest in domestic electrocution. Er . . . did I mention that the electrician found a Cloth Bag in the cellar. Under the sleeping Lost Cat in the Cloth Bag was a Dogs on Leash Petition, on the reverse of which was a map showing the proposed locations in LL of M&S, a New Coffee Bar and Liddle?

[SeanMacGabhann]

Not at all J - but for me it's one of those things I know I ought to sort out but as nothing has gone wrong yet, find it easier to play parlour games on the forum

From what work I have done in the flat the electrics seem to be in better shape than a lot of the other infrastructure when the house was converted. But better doesn't necessarily mean good enough. It's good to know about these things and thanks for the heads up