Fiduciary Responsibility

When Safer Greenbelt encounters dangerous or unprofessional wiring, you will be told right away. When equipment was installed incompetently, you need to know. When antique equipment—an installation that once may have been kosher—either is way behind today's safety standards or is approaching the end of its safe life (or has passed that point), again you need to know. That communication is an essential part of a consultation.

A warning: Deteriorated or inexpertly installed wiring may stop working as the result of the disturbance associated with being examined; when this happens, the equipment's failure cannot be taken as the responsibility of the person who examined it. This is rare—often it will offer a clue that suggests backing off—but it's appeared several times over the decades. To repeat for emphasis: you get to choose if there's anything you DON'T want examined.

Finagle's Law, a corollary to Murphy's, says, "Once a job is botched, attempts to improve it make it worse." While amusing, this wry observation is not a truism. However, rock-solid experience has demonstrated that when something is dangerous, "Just get it working" is not a wise choice. Some consultations have dealt with the aftermaths of those risky decisions.

If something seems dangerous, fiduciary responsibility—the duty an expert takes on—demands that power to it be left off. That's true even if the equipment had been working. This decision came up most recently less than 15 years ago.

If a professional connects something they suspect to be dangerous, the pro is taking some responsibility for harm that ensues. This is true even if they were "just following orders." Isolating the dangerous equipment, and restoring power to other parts of the circuit that had been feeding it, is an option—if there's reason to believe the danger is restricted to that equipment.

Examples

What does this mean in practice? Here are three contrasting examples. In each case, the equipment was a light fixture ("luminaire"). Wires that feed ceiling lights are the miner's canary of aged wiring, because heat rose into that wiring over the years from incandescent light bulbs, cooking its insulation.

1. Ignorant and unsafe. One customer asked for examination of a ceiling light, one that clearly was not original to the house. On removal, a label became visible. This warned that its use was restricted to locations with newer wiring whose insulation is rated to withstand higher temperatures. Such a fixture is dangerous to the pre-1970s wiring. Besides explaining what kind of fixture would likely be safe for connection to that wiring, as a safe stopgap Safer Greenbelt offered to swap in a plain porcelain lampholder to provide light until they could find some fixture suited to the wiring that they liked better. (The legal alternative is far more expensive.)
2. Leave that old puppy sleeping.. When another customer asked about an old chandelier, a close look made it necesssary to warn him that, given its age, it might be in bad-enough shape that it should not be reconnected due to the risk of fire. He decided he'd rather David not examine it. Instead, we went on to examine other parts of his wiring that didn't seem as fraught. His call.
3. Immediate Hazard. The final example is the most dangerous category. In more than one instance over the decades, on examination a lighting fixture revealed rotten wiring. Dried-out insulation was crumbling off the wires. This has happened with receptacle outlets as well. Where this deterioration is present only within an inch of the splice or terminal screw, close sources of heat, it is possible to add insulation, usually tape, or cut back the rot. However, where the wires' insulation is dried out as far back as is visible, the circuit must be turned off and left off, or disconnected from the fuse or circuit breaker. The wiring needs replacement, not patching.