Preparation Week #8

This week has probably been the hardest so far as an electrician.

It’s been chaos – endless house testing, even though its been great practice there were just too many.

The biggest headache though, has been my own mistakes from rushing. Almost every property needs some installation work or accessories swapped (sockets, lights, etc.), but, ironically, hurrying around just slowed everything down. Remeasuring wire/conduit, re-levelling, redrilling holes is a really time consumer.

Honestly,it shows all the truth in “measure twice, cut once”. I’ve been more of a “measure once, cut twice” guy this week.

It’s quite funny really. I’m glad these slip-ups happen though – you can’t fix a mistake you never made. From now on, I’ll bring some artistic passion to my work and cut out the silly errors.

Beyond installations, we’ve done a few fault finds this week. Fault finding is self-explanatory: tracking down issues in a circuit when it fails a test or stops working. They’re not common, but when they’re not obvious, they’re a real pain.

The first one hit early in the week: a kitchen socket circuit failed insulation resistance, meaning a wire was badly compromised somewhere. We traced it by testing between sockets and across the circuit – turned out a ceiling cable was burnt to a crisp. Exactly what I wanted on a Monday. Luckily it was an easy fix, we replaced the cable after drilling into the brick wall and replaced the fan as well for good luck.

Another one stood out when the main earth reading came back way too high. (For anyone not in the know: earth resistance needs to stay low so fault current can safely flow if something goes wrong.) We got 1.37 ohms; the legal limit for a TN-S system (Terra Neutral Separate) is 0.8 ohms. TNS system pictured below:

Now as you can see in the picture the earth wire is meant to clamp onto the incoming cable and its meant to be about 10 mm squared (its a big cable to protect the whole property). However after a little bit of investigation we found the the wire had been removed from the clamp and had been reattached with some strands of wire (smaller wire = higher resistance). So all our work on that house got put on hault and is still on hault till the power supplying company comes out to fix the issue.

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German

Ive learnt a bunch of words over the past few weeks, my consistency with German studying and the flashcards is really starting to pay off, im understanding a lot of basic sentences and even if I dont understand everything I can grasp a fair few words. At the moment grammar is my weakest point by far, so since Ive got a better grip on German now I should learn the basics of the grammar so I can make more sense of the more complex sentences.

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Reading

Started reading “The Prize” by Daniel Yergin - This is gonna be one long book so I’ll probably read that and something else at the same time but I’ve not decided yet

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And Just as a final note, I opened substack today to see 6 new posts of people doing the preperation, Im really happy to see its starting to get some of the traction is really deserves. All the great posts is setting a really good and high standard for other people reading, I know it makes me want to achieve more and be more interesting.

Its brilliant to see and I hope everyone keeps up the excellent work.

Anyway I know its a short post but thanks for reading

- James Harrison