The most alarming part of a property isn’t the kitchen or even a loft conversion with brand new wiring. That honour tends to belong to an often-forgotten space – the garage, the shed or a detached brick outbuilding around the back of the garden. One that has been used for storage and to power a cable from a nearby property for a ‘bit of light’ for the past twenty years.
Outbuildings tend to fail more tests than any other space. It’s not necessarily because the wiring work was shoddy to start with. They simply fail because their wiring has been forgotten.
In the rest of the home, especially frequently used rooms such as kitchens, there is a good chance that they will be rewired at least once every few years as part of a renovation. Even rooms we might think of as high-risk, like bathrooms (and with good reason, where water and electricity pose serious hazards), get a lot of attention. But when it comes to spaces we don’t really live in, which are in some way divorced from our daily lives, we can forget they even exist.
There’s nothing more concerning to an electrician than a garage left untouched for a decade as a time capsule, hooked up for the first time by some unknown electrician as a one-off job. For Electrical Testing Cheltenham, visit www.blu-fish.co.uk/electrical-services-cheltenham/electrical-testing-cheltenham/
There are several reasons why outbuildings struggle with passing tests. Firstly, it’s often the age of the wiring. Some garages, sheds, and detached spaces are still fitted with old cabling that doesn’t meet modern safety standards. For example, if you find earthing missing from a system, you may be able to guess its age.
Secondly, there is the environment in which outbuildings exist. They tend to be cold, damp places. In a kitchen, bathroom or lounge, a cable is not normally too exposed to the elements. But in garages and sheds, it can become damp. And, just like older wiring in buildings, this will see off your cable insulation. We also sometimes see connections buried behind walls or other harder-to-reach places. While this isn’t normally much of a problem for connections indoors, in wetter environments, water ingress can cause them to corrode over time, leading to a potential failure. In a lot of cases, however, it’s not the dampness but rather the wildlife that proves to be the culprit. Rodents love to chew through wires, particularly where they stick out of the wall or when someone has tried to hide them by jamming them underneath a floorboard somewhere.