Fri, 17 Dec 2010
Electricians
I have discovered the following gem behind the wardrobe (note the colors of the wires).
And this is no self-made crap, but a work of a proffessional electrican.
I have been wondering why connecting my laptop to the TV-set caused those
huge sparks and a blackout. So I went to verify the wiring and found that
because of the above, some of my power outlets were wired with the current
phase live wire on the peg :-(
On the positive side, nobody has noticed for two years, which means almost nobody these days really uses three-wired power with chassis ground connected to the peg of the wall outlet. Well, nobody except my laptop, apparently.
3 replies for this story:
avakar wrote:
This sounds intriguing, but I don't get it, could you please elaborate a little? Where does the front cable lead to? By the way, the wires are called live (black), neutral (blue) and ground (or earth; green/yellow) in English. If I understand correctly, you had the live wire connected to the ground terminal in some of your outlets? I'm surprised you're still alive---I think ATX power supplies cases are grounded. I don't understand why connecting a laptop and a TV set would cause a short, though.
Yenya wrote: Re: avakar
The white cable goes to the power outlet mounted on the side of the wardrobe. No problem with that. The laptop connected to the incorrectly wired outlet had live 220V on the outside of the VGA connector, and the TV-set which uses two-wire europlug only had a problem with this. Anyway, thanks for the clarification wrt. the Englis terms.
Vašek Stodůlka wrote:
I'm really happy, that we made a reconstruction and we have a current protector now. I had to put in trash some devices, which were not correctly shielded, but the result is, that I'm now sure, that every device is connected exactly to live and neutral wires.