Bodge Saturday.....

[ricicle]

As some may know I am a Maintenance Electrician, not a contractor.
Anyway doing a favour today for some friends - they have had some building work done in the last couple of years and some issues occured with the Electricians doing the work (company went bust - someone else finished off, Elecsa registered and cert. issued - BC cert no MWC/EIC)
All was ok up till a few days ago when several sockets stopped working.
I was greeted eventually by a broken L wire in the back of a SFCU

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• ricicle
• 13 Nov 2010
• 1

Alarm bells rang when I saw this:-

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• ricicle
• 13 Nov 2010
• 1

Not only were 6 double sockets spurred off 1 double but the existing 'ring' circuit was not a ring. Even when I gently pulled on the spurs L it came out of the DSS.

And this made me chuckle

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• ricicle
• 13 Nov 2010
• 1

There are 3 x 30mA RCDs all providing no discrimination with each other (TT system)

The only piece of luck I had was there was a spare Steeple 20A mcb for me to whack the lot on as I had neither the time or inclination to search around a newly refurbished house.
And this is just my pet hate

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• ricicle
• 13 Nov 2010
• 1

Yes they are just single sheathed !

So much for my quiet Saturday morning

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Elecsa registered and cert. issued - BC cert no MWC/EIC)

You will of course be reporting them to:

Elecsa

Trading Standards

Building Control

Police


won't you?

 

[johnheritage]

My brother is a lawyer and I have spoken with trading standards before as well.

In terms of getting something actually done about these things, trading standards are like kids with water pistols.

If you want to seriously send the message, you want to suggest the guy opens a claim with the small claims court to recover the money he spent on getting it done.

It costs about £45 I think.

The work would need to be so bad it was criminally negligent / illegal according to the building code or some other well agreed standard. To be sure that you'll win.

Once you click "Submit" or put the envelope in the post, the problem is then a genuine law & judge based problem, and you will likely end up seeing an actual judge in person.

If it's horrendously bad (well below the black and white agreed standards), it will probably only take ten minutes of explanation for the judge to find in your favour and then charge the original guy for correcting the work, the legal fees and any other fees you've incurred in taking him to court (e.g. lost wages from days off coming to court / not being able to check work related things on your computer because it doesn't power up properly).

Moneyclaim.gov.uk is the genuine UK courts online front end. Not one of the billion "no win / no fee" compo sites, it's the courts themselves.

Just read the advice documents, carefully. If you can manage your paper qualifications and you've been genuinely cheated, you're smart enough to file claims yourself and win.

The judge will issue an order for the money - meaning, the legal system has then decided they owe it and they need to refund it, by law. If it's not paid, he'll then let look at approving a bailiff order. The cost for the idiot on the other end ROCKETS.

They could owe you £100 for the work they've charged for. By the time the judge is done, that might be £300. By the time the bailiffs have knocked a few times and auctioned their TV, stereo, car, tools and anything else they can find (for about 1/10th the original value) it can end up with the ne'er do well loosing thousands on what they paid for their stuff. It's to encourage idiots to simply pay up when they should and stop messing around.

 

[crystal ball]

Depends if the offending person is a limited company or sole trader, I am pursuing a limited company with little or no assets at the moment and the advice I got was to take the hit and forget it

 

[johnheritage]

That may be true, but don't give up too soon.

The limited companies (the smaller ones) abuse the ass out of that limited tag, and they know they can use it to 'cheat' the legal system to some extent by not being personally liable.

However, the first thing a company has to do, legally, is cover it's debts when it goes down. That means liquidation and everything has to go until the debts are sorted, or as close as they can get.

In your case, they may be BS'ing you.

If they're still actively doing work, they likely have a van and tools. Those are viable targets for covering debts. E.g. a flue analyzer, that's got to get some money back from someone interested. If you've seen them with tools, try to find out (or remember) if they looked expensive enough to begin covering the debt.

There are guys who abuse this to the extent that they should genuinely be in jail. E.g. the guys who use forced selling techniques with double glazing.

They'll set up a limited company, target old people / single women with kids, then not leave the house even if that means sitting around beyond midnight. I watched one guy do it to my mum (4 kids, dead husband) when I was younger, and he had her go out for a big deposit at 1am in the morning (he was still sat in the house and I wasn't old enough to spot what was happening or tell him to get the fk out before I called the police).

They'll collect deposits from as many people as possible (before the legal letters start), then pretend the company has gone bankrupt and close it, with all the money disappearing because they haven't actually bought anything with it.

Then re-register under a different company name with a different director (their mate). Companies House is well aware that they're doing it.

And they NEED the publics help in identifying them when you find out the guy from the last company is now working for a new one, with his mate as the director, doing the same thing.

So, for your example, if you saw those guys under a different name, they'd be worth keeping an eye on and possibly speaking to companies house about... "I know they liquidated, and now the same guys are doing the same thing under a new name". The company status is listed, for free, for every single registered company on companies house's website, and they have to be registered to declare a limit status (they can't get that status as far as a court is concerned without doing so, if they don't have it on paper, they're personally liable).