Today I watched an adult couple in their forties spend 30 minutes trying to wire a plug socket, they, mainly she, eventually did it, because I spent 30 minutes yesterday teaching her the basics.
It’s not like I just happened to trip over one of the few things they could not do, people today can’t do fucking ANYTHING for themselves… I mean, I have never in my life made a victoria sponge cake from ingredients from scratch, but give me ten minutes to find a recipe and I’ll give it a go, and it may not win prizes but it will be edible.
I’m sitting here thinking, trying to remember the last time I *had* to call in an expert…
- I *choose* to have my mate service my cars, he is bloody excellent and has all the kit and owns the garage, I’d be doing it lying on the road.
- ummmm, I went to the high street opticians a year or so ago for a new pair of spectacles, the hight street shop is just a front, nobody there has a clue how to grind lenses either, that’s done elsewhere and shipped to them…
- ten years ago I went to a lawyer in my FRA skank ho child custody case, I’d have been better off blowing the money on hookers and never even turning up at court.
- I’m struggling here…. ten years ago I paid a local machine shop to skim a landrover head and put new guides in and new seats and cut the valves… everything else I did myself including an all new wiring loom from scratch…
- ummmm…… I used to go to the barbers and pay for a haircut and shave now and again…
I actually can’t think of anything else…. I’ve never in my life called in a builder, or a carpenter, or a plumber, or an electrician, or a computer guy, or a cable guy, or a gardener, or a tree surgeon, or a vet (dog is healthy and lives or is unhealthy and dies) or a painter and decorator, or bought a car from a dealership, oh yes, never called in a marine engineer or yacht painter or anything.
One thing I do have in common with other people of my ilk and my age range, none of us have had any apprentices…
I’m sitting here looking at my old Kennet which was last used to dress up a couple of old and abused filleting knives, a week or two ago and really needs to be put back onto a shelf in the workshop/junk room… the knives were more serrated than straight having been done on an angle grinder, and we so blunt they would barely cut butter… the drive belt for the kennet has been missing for ages and rather than go out and buy or make one I grabbed some button thread and made about 20 loops around the pulleys before tying it off… a little furniture polish and the threads darkened nicely and started to pass torque and rpm to the stone… ten minutes later I was grinding the knife edges and re-creating the profile and ten minutes after that they were being finished off on the diamond whetstone.
Hands up how many of you remember being able to use a pair of tights as an emergency fan belt?
So today’s lesson was talking to someone who ordered a pool filter off amazon, it wasn’t a 500 gallon per hour job that also had a label saying it consumed 37 watts at the mains, it was a intex 1,000 gallon an hour job which came with a 1/2 hp motor… so they’re freaking because it came with a continental plug rated at 16 amps and I told them to just go buy a Uk plug and put a 3A fuse in it, the RCD switch socket will do everything else… “BUT IT’S a SIXTEEN AMP PLUG!” they say, I don’t give a shit I say, half a horsepower is 370 watts and 370 watts over 230 volts is about 1.6 amperes, so maybe it’s a typo or maybe you can’t see the decimal point or maybe it’s r
The fucking shite pool heater I have mentioned before, this photo is after the plug was cut off and about 5 to 6 inches down the cable from what was the mains plug, look at that shit in the neutral line, corroded and cracking and utter shit, barely 3 years old.
This second pic is the original wiring inside the heater itself, the thinner pink and white wires are cheapo steel core, on the right on the mains side they have used yellow crimp terminals for everything even though the blue crimp is the right size for 2.5 mm2 cores, because that way they don’t have to worry about the neutral and earth posts being different diameters, it’s always going to fit over the post… the live goes off up to a crimp spade.
There was no cable retention / clamping around the grommet either, just a spot of superglue inside to stick the sheath of the cable to the grommet, I got the core out of the grommet and used insulation tape to increase diameter and gave it the good old tug test and it’s good to go, I didn’t cheap out by shortening the cable either, I bought two metres of cable and the new cable is over two feet longer than the old one… in short the original elecro.co.uk job was an exercise in the minimum possible quality and materials bill, fuck it, good enough, ship it out the door and fuck it.
These things are around 400 quid here in the UK, for 5 quid at the trade counter for some decent immersion heater heat proof grade 2.5 mm2 three core cable and a heavy duty plug and a couple of crimps from my drawer and maybe 15 minutes of my time I have saved them from splashing out 400 quid on a new one, they are still out 25 quid
So, this is the safest and most regulated country in the world where the nanny state watches over us all, and this sort of shit sails through all the time… how lucky we are we don’t live in some unregulated shithole like mumbai…
Luckily for these people, who of course are parents and have children, they still have children, and they still have a shed, and the contents of the shed, because it was me that took power down to the shed, 4 mm twin and earth inside marshall tufflex 20 mm trunking and down to a proper twin gang RCD switched socket, and a 30A cooker isolation switch at the house end, and from that to a 20 amp breaker, so the RCD socket tripped out for good when its guts melted, and they had to use a screwdriver to lever the plug out of the socket, but like I said, this is thanks to me insisting I wasn’t even going to fucking touch the job unless I could go the the trade counter and buy 4 mm cable and conduit to put it in and a branded RCD socket at the shed end and a branded breaker and switch at the house end, not some cheap ass foreign shit from the chain DIY store at half the price.
I’m sick of quoting Sagan about societies built on science and technology inhabited by fucking mouth breathers.
You think Mario Draghi can wire a fucking plug?