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Do NOT get cheated by an unscrupulous electrician!

alan — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:19:01 +0000

Do NOT get cheated by an unscrupulous electrician!

I went to a old ladies house recently and was absolutely horrified by the fact that she was about to have a very expensive, not to mention very invasive rewire on a bungalow. This lady was obviously in a late 70s and I’ve been a widow for almost 10 years and she was exactly the kind of fodder for a conman. In actual fact I’ve been called to replace the battery in the burglar alarm panel, but whilst I was there we got chatting and she told me that the power had been switched off because the lights were fusing and she’d had an electrician. He had told her that the wiring was substandard and dangerous and this ad obviously scared her into a complete so-called emergency rewire the following week.

On a quick inspection of the fuse box within a few minutes it was obvious to me that this building had been rewired in the late 1970s in PVC double insulated cable and everything was earthed and safe !!!!. Okay the consumer unit was a little out of date with rewire able fuses instead of circuit breakers and the main earthling to the services was a little out of date, but overall it was fine.

She told me that she could not switch the lights on because they continually fused, but I investigated and literally within 10 minutes it turned out to be one of the obvious things it usually is, in this case was just a metal lamp holder which had baked the wires inside itself because it was in an enclosed lampshade collecting the heat. I’m not blowing my own trumpet, but when you’ve been in the job for many years you usually know very quickly what the problem is and in my case this could be a electrical installation, a security alarm or a CCTV system. It’s very rare you cannot pinpoint the fault quickly because you’ve seen it so many times before it’s obvious. I fixed the fault switch the power back on and everything was back to normal and she didn’t have to spend her quoted £2600 on a rewire that wasn’t necessarily!

It’s so annoying what kind of world is this! You get not just a conman but sometimes some a jobs worth electrician comes along and says your installation is over 20 years old and you need a complete rewire Rubbish!

Even if it’s over 30 years old very often the wiring is earthed and double PVC insulated which has not deteriorated and is fine. Things might not be up to code their standards, but you should not be told you have to change things which might not be up to current day standards and wiring regulations, because they were fine when they were installed and they are still safe.

I’m not saying that I wouldn’t point out things which could be improved like a new consumer unit with earth leakage protection breaker and current overload breakers. And I might suggest also that new main earthling would be a good idea, but it’s best to put this in its true perspective and point out it’s not dangerous and it certainly doesn’t warrant a full rewire etc

Anyway on this occasion a little old lady is happy because she’s got a new battery in her alarm panel and the power is back on and she only had to fork out £50 which is much cheaper than £2500 she’d been facing!

Next time I might start on security alarm companies don’t get me going with their misleading contracts making people believe they have bought the equipment when they’re basically renting it and when the security alarm triggers for any reason, they’re forced to have an engineer out every time because it has a locked out with a engineers code ! I could rant on forever, it’s not just individuals it sometimes companies which also have unscrupulous codes of practice which are just geared to extract money from their vulnerable customers.

AD Alarms. www.adalarms.co.uk We specialise in CCTV and Security Alarm installations established 1984. We are a family run business based in Bradford West Yorkshire and Whitby North Yorkshire. Friendly free advice on the telephone telephone (01274) 614650 E-mail sales@adalarms.co.uk

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Which is the safest place to live, the fishing port of Whitby or the city of Bradford?

alan — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:02:07 +0000

When I bought a second home in Whitby a small fishing port in North Yorkshire, it made me compare the quality of life in comparison to living in my home town of Bradford, a large inland city.

The reason I’m posting the question above is not simply for the answer. I’m also putting forward the thought that sometimes we live our lives not in the best places in our country.

In my opinion there is little doubt which is the correct answer to the above question, but I’m going to give you my answer at the end of this article when I explain what brought me to this conclusion.

I live on the outskirts of Bradford in West Yorkshire, in quite a picturesque little village called Idle, which is quite a funny name when you consider its true meaning. We have the famous Idle Working Men’s Club, with its emblem of a working man leaning on his spade, get the idea? People from all over the world ask for affiliated passes so they can say they are a member of the idle working men’s club. Idle is quite nice in itself, being an old Victorian village, but its only three miles from the centre of Bradford city and 9 miles from the centre of Leeds.

Being so close to the city centre is good for my business, which is installing security alarm systems and CCTV. I’ve done this job since 1983. Why is this? Because, unfortunately, city centres in the United Kingdom are surrounded by crime and burglary. I used to think there must be other parts of the country which were not quite as bad. Now I definitely think this is the case and I’ll explain why I think so.

In 2007 I bought a holiday cottage in the beautiful old fishing port of Whitby, North Yorkshire. The cottage needed lots of renovation work because I intended to let the property to holidaymakers as well as use it myself. It’s in a gorgeous setting near the harbour, in a very quiet old yard with outhouses. The first thing that crossed my mind was this is very easy to rob because it’s so quiet and there are no neighbours directly opposite. That was my security installer mind in force. So my first two jobs on the cottage were not renovation projects but firstly to install a security alarm system, which also had a telephone dialler which would ring me if the security alarm was activated and, secondly, to install a CCTV camera in the loft with a digital video recorder.

Then I moved on to all the necessary renovation jobs to make the cottage comfortable for holidaymakers. When I finished renovating the cottage, I asked the local and largest holiday letting agency to come around to view the property, quietly expecting nothing but praise for all my hard work and expenditure. It was actually the owner of the agency himself who came to view the cottage. He was a pleasant and professional gentleman, but I’m afraid his first words were not entirely complimentary! His first comment was: Why did you put a security alarm and CCTV camera on this cottage ? I explained my worries about the vulnerability from the burglary point of view, to which he replied that he had well over 120 cottages on his books in the area, and had been in the property letting business since 1970. Mine was the only cottage which had ever had a security alarm and CCTV installation. He went on to explain that there was very little burglary in the area. I suddenly started to have a different perspective on what it was like to live in an area like Whitby. Had I wasted my time and money because, even though there was no labour cost on the security equipment, as I had installed it myself, it had still cost just under 1000 UK pounds for materials?

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending how you look at it, I soon found out by asking local people their thoughts regarding burglary, that he was telling me the truth. They confirmed it was something which very rarely happened and was not a priority to worry about. Then, with a little time spent on my professional hobby of siren box watching, which basically means that when I’m travelling around Bradford I continually look at the Siren boxes on properties to see which company did the installation, I suddenly found around the Whitby area there were virtually no siren boxes to watch! As we say in Yorkshire, the penny had dropped, which means you suddenly see something from a different perspective.

I often meet older retired people in Bradford who have just been burgled and they typically say things like: It’s not like it used to be when we were young; you could leave your front door open without fear of intrusion. It looks like you can still, as long as you don’t live on the outskirts of a busy city!

So the answer to my initial question is, in my opinion, Whitby is much safer than Bradford.

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