V
Vitesse
This is long, so apologies but I have never come across this before.
I got asked by my local garage where I get my van MoT'd if I could do an EICR for him as his insurance company have requested one.
So I pitch up today and the owner produced a load of old PIR's and EICR's that have been produced in the past by the old spark who has now retired. The intention was to get familiar with the install so I could give him a quote.
It is and old rural garage 3 phase fed from an overhead. So I started looking at the old paperwork and trying to match it up to the different fuse boards and I couldn't match hardly any of it, it was like it was for a totally different installation.
Anyway I went to see the owner and explained I am going to have to do a complete survey of the place before I start the EICR because none of the old paperwork is clear as to what is being supplied by which board on each phase. He says ok no problem.
Everything in the place is surface mounted so you can literally follow it. Now here is where it gets weird. I followed one cable from the distribution board and it left the garage and went out through the wall and went inside the house next door. So I called the owner over and asked if he had any idea why it went next door and he said no but one of the blokes working in the garage owned the house next door, so I said can I go and have a look next door.
So the house next door is two flats. When I got in there, there was another supply coming off the same overhead pole for the house but when I looked at the consumer unit the bottom busbar had been cut in half with a separate supply at each end. The one from the garage was supplying the downstairs flat, the other half the upstairs. So the garage has been paying the electric bill for the downstairs flat for years and it is rented with utility bills included. I wonder why!!!!
Then it gets even weirder. The guy renting the downstairs flat says to me, "Can you switch off the supply for the downstairs flat I want to check if it switches off the garage". Ok so he goes and checks the garage and says "yeah that's off. I shouldn't really tell you this but when I was growing some canabis plants in the garage, I had big sodium lights and transformers in there running for months and I couldn't workout why my electric bill hadn't gone up"!!!!!! Why would you tell someone this that you have only met 5 minutes earlier????
So not only was the landlord getting paid extra money from the tenant for electric that was being nicked from the garage but the tenant was growing his weed thanks to the garage.
The tenant asked how much would it cost to resolve the problem so that the house was not taking its supply from the garage. I gave him a price and then he said "will you take a bribe from me not to tell the garage"!!!
So I explained I couldn't do that and that I would tell the garage owner it wasn't clear. I didn't want to get on the wrong side of some grow your own pot smoker. Anyway I went next door and explained to the garage what I had found and said to him don't let on to him what I have told you, just say it was unclear and that the only way to confirm it was to disconnect the supply inside the garage to see if the downstairs flat looses its supply?
It made the day interesting if nothing else. Plus a few more potential pounds to isolate the supply from the garage.
I got asked by my local garage where I get my van MoT'd if I could do an EICR for him as his insurance company have requested one.
So I pitch up today and the owner produced a load of old PIR's and EICR's that have been produced in the past by the old spark who has now retired. The intention was to get familiar with the install so I could give him a quote.
It is and old rural garage 3 phase fed from an overhead. So I started looking at the old paperwork and trying to match it up to the different fuse boards and I couldn't match hardly any of it, it was like it was for a totally different installation.
Anyway I went to see the owner and explained I am going to have to do a complete survey of the place before I start the EICR because none of the old paperwork is clear as to what is being supplied by which board on each phase. He says ok no problem.
Everything in the place is surface mounted so you can literally follow it. Now here is where it gets weird. I followed one cable from the distribution board and it left the garage and went out through the wall and went inside the house next door. So I called the owner over and asked if he had any idea why it went next door and he said no but one of the blokes working in the garage owned the house next door, so I said can I go and have a look next door.
So the house next door is two flats. When I got in there, there was another supply coming off the same overhead pole for the house but when I looked at the consumer unit the bottom busbar had been cut in half with a separate supply at each end. The one from the garage was supplying the downstairs flat, the other half the upstairs. So the garage has been paying the electric bill for the downstairs flat for years and it is rented with utility bills included. I wonder why!!!!
Then it gets even weirder. The guy renting the downstairs flat says to me, "Can you switch off the supply for the downstairs flat I want to check if it switches off the garage". Ok so he goes and checks the garage and says "yeah that's off. I shouldn't really tell you this but when I was growing some canabis plants in the garage, I had big sodium lights and transformers in there running for months and I couldn't workout why my electric bill hadn't gone up"!!!!!! Why would you tell someone this that you have only met 5 minutes earlier????
So not only was the landlord getting paid extra money from the tenant for electric that was being nicked from the garage but the tenant was growing his weed thanks to the garage.
The tenant asked how much would it cost to resolve the problem so that the house was not taking its supply from the garage. I gave him a price and then he said "will you take a bribe from me not to tell the garage"!!!
So I explained I couldn't do that and that I would tell the garage owner it wasn't clear. I didn't want to get on the wrong side of some grow your own pot smoker. Anyway I went next door and explained to the garage what I had found and said to him don't let on to him what I have told you, just say it was unclear and that the only way to confirm it was to disconnect the supply inside the garage to see if the downstairs flat looses its supply?
It made the day interesting if nothing else. Plus a few more potential pounds to isolate the supply from the garage.
