Power Shower

January 2, 2017 6:01 PM

World's Worst Wiring

More in this NYT article.

Original contest link, although the photos mentioned in this article no longer seem to be displayed on the page.

All the finalists.

posted by hilaryjade (79 comments total)

Oh, and here is the Survey Monkey link, which is easier to scroll through than the embedded survey in the finalists link above.
posted by hilaryjade at 6:02 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

I can't tell whether the guy in #9 is plucky and determined, or merely in a short-straw/FNG/"red shirt" situation.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:06 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

See also Power Trip, about the privatization of electric power in post-Soviet Georgia.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:10 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Also, this is, well:

Among the more unnerving sights a traveler may come across in distant corners of the world are giant hairballs of wires, clumped at the tops of utility poles or hanging perilously from the sides of buildings.

They speak of the exuberant, confounding and sometimes dangerous disorder of a country free of the rules and regulations that make modern life safe.

Wait until the deregulation you voted for hits your shores, Trump-voting first-world-free-market-will-take-care-of-itself folks! Talk to people in Flint about what happens when they turn on their taps. You're already there. This is the smuggest of smug NYT bullshit.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:14 PM on January 2, 2017 [19 favorites]

The English seem to have a phobic aversion to power outlets in the bathroom, which I've never been able to extract a good reason for (we have them here, we use 240V, no one dies). The second place getter seems to be an example of that, it's not great but it's a load safer than most of the other examples.
posted by deadwax at 6:18 PM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]

I hope to never utilize a 'suicide style' hot water showerhead again.
posted by RolandOfEld at 6:18 PM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Ha, the first one is from my home city of Chennai, India - which does not surprise me at all! But I'm surprised that it's being called by its old name - Madras - it hasn't been Madras since 1996.
posted by peacheater at 6:22 PM on January 2, 2017 [10 favorites]

There's a couple on there that remind me of the wiring in the basement when we first bought this house. The previous owner thought he was handy, an opinion my electrician disputed in great and lengthy detail.
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 6:40 PM on January 2, 2017 [9 favorites]

If you love this stuff like I do, don't miss This Old House's Nightmare Inspection series. I think they're up to episode 34?
posted by Dashy at 7:02 PM on January 2, 2017 [6 favorites]

OK, I'm assuming #12 is a wooden utility pole whose base has rotted away, but it looks like something out of Roadside Picnic.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:08 PM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Our place when we bought it had a garden watering system with an electrical cable outside that had wires duct taped to an old extension cord with the plug cut off, the other end of which was run through a hole in the wall, and then that end had also been cut off and wired with speaker wire to a power socket that had been installed inside a bathroom cabinet for the timer to plug into. The mains was hooked up to it all somewhere too, again patched in using speaker cable. It was... epic.
posted by lollusc at 7:12 PM on January 2, 2017 [7 favorites]

You can pretty much stick a UK plug into any environment, as most (if not all) of the mains cables have a fuse built into the plug.
posted by Brocktoon at 7:12 PM on January 2, 2017

Raise the plug 10cm and the shower arrangement in winning entry #2 would be commonplace throughout Malaysia. Now I know I've survived one brush with death every morning I'll feel less concerned about my commute!
posted by BinGregory at 7:20 PM on January 2, 2017

Inside a heated shower head (suicide shower).
How to Survive a Suicide Shower
"In fact, it’s best just not to look at the heater from this point on. It really makes things easier. Trust me. Try not to think about it. Keep your head down, do your business and get the hell out of there."
posted by 445supermag at 7:22 PM on January 2, 2017 [10 favorites]

We moved into our house ten years ago when it still had wiring from the late 19th century. I have to give those Victorian era electricians credit for building a system that ran for 120 years or so but we sleep a little better now that we upgraded to wiring that passes current codes. On the one hand, it was kind of cool flipping a switch that was installed when Grover Cleveland was president and having it still work but my devotion to historic restoration only goes so far.
posted by octothorpe at 7:26 PM on January 2, 2017 [18 favorites]

We opened up a wall in our kitchen to discover live wires surrounded by newspaper from the 1940's.
posted by Lucinda at 7:29 PM on January 2, 2017 [6 favorites]

The English seem to have a phobic aversion to power outlets in the bathroom, which I've never been able to extract a good reason for (we have them here, we use 240V, no one dies).

It's more than that. Light fixtures have (or had) to be on the ceiling and switches have to be pull cords. Every single plug has a built in fuse.

Once you have experienced enough English trades craft you understand the lack of trust. I'm sure there are good tradesmen doing good work somewhere in England. Only because I have faith. In seven years I saw no actual evidence.

Combine that with Agatha Christie and you get massively over engineered safety precautions that cause crippling physical injuries (when you step on those bloody plugs that are always prongs up - Lego has nothing on a UK plug!) and probably starts fires due to extension cords being combined with hair dryers and straighteners or them being used around flammable stuff in bedrooms as opposed to much less flammable bathrooms.

We had a short in our in the shower water heater in the UK that never got hot enough for long enough to do anything until my parents came to visit and the number of people showering doubled. Then plastic melted and after that I even posted an ask about acrid smells of unknown origin. Nothing quite like realizing you were soaking yourself with water about 1 foot away from an electrical short.

I'd like to say I feel safer now in the U.S. but I've looked down a few alleys in Chicago and there are many third-world-esque rats nests atop the poles. At 3am just this Christmas morning the building across from mine went up in flames with sleep shattering propane tank explosions probably as a result of Christmas light caused tree fire. Canada wasn't perfect either. Like when my parents said "Oh yeah that outlet has been shorting out for the entire time we owned the house" after I paralyzed my arm plugging in a hot air popcorn popper in their kitchen. I'm not sure what would have happened if I hadn't been able to lean back.

Which is to say that electricity scares the fuck out me and I am cautious as hell about it.
posted by srboisvert at 7:31 PM on January 2, 2017 [15 favorites]

The Hanoi one could easily be from Tokyo.
posted by oheso at 7:32 PM on January 2, 2017

I see these electric heaters in showers in places like Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and I freak. NEVER do I touch them. Instead, I'm 100% cold water all the way.

When I first saw one I didn't even know what to think, except, "Are people here invulnerable to death by electricity somehow?"

Asking led nowhere.
posted by Mike Mongo at 7:41 PM on January 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

I can't tell whether the guy in #9 is plucky and determined, or merely in a short-straw/FNG/"red shirt" situation.

I don't think bamboo is particularly conductive, so he's probably fine so long as his left hand only touches the ladder.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:52 PM on January 2, 2017

Thanks for letting me know that the shower head in a small hotel in San Jose Costa Rica where I was staying that had an electrical cord hanging from it and then electrical taped here and there on the wall until it reached an outlet is called a suicide shower. It was the shortest and scariest bit of personal hygiene I have ever experienced. But I did live to tell about it...
posted by njohnson23 at 7:52 PM on January 2, 2017

I'm more concerned about him falling off the damned ladder, to be honest.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:52 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

I seriously do not understand anything about British bathrooms. And I say that having lived there and travelled there extensively.
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:03 PM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

The last one with the dangling pole is showing a design feature; that's exactly how it's supposed to work when a pole gets broken (of course, the pole should eventually be replaced.)
posted by kiltedtaco at 8:06 PM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

I hate those wired showerheads. I am tall, so they are right at eye level (or below), and I am constantly afraid of accidentally touching the wrong part while shampooing.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:24 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

I hate those wired showerheads. I am tall, so they are right at eye level (or below), and I am constantly afraid of accidentally touching the wrong part while shampooing.

posted by Dip Flash

Eponysterical.

Or shocking.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:33 PM on January 2, 2017 [10 favorites]

Having wired my basement myself (with permits and inspections), I'm terrified of this stuff.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:42 PM on January 2, 2017

we have them here, we use 240V, no one dies

Quite.
posted by flabdablet at 8:46 PM on January 2, 2017 [6 favorites]

I don't know if they don't regulate this or what, but the one in Hannoi is not remarkable for Viet Nam.
posted by aubilenon at 8:58 PM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Eh, I lived in Turkey. Same same. Adana was interesting--very much like that shot of Hanoi.

But the isolated Anatolian villages we visited were amazing. We would drive along narrow mountain roads for miles with what looked like a typical orange Home Depot 110 power cord running alongside in a ditch, let me rephrase that, running alongside in a running ditch. Occasionally the cord would randomly go up the hill to a...long bendy swaying stick that would carry it over the road to go swooping down vast canyons and we'd eventually pick it up again at the bottom. When we got to the tiny village, eventually there would be some kind of outlet with ten other cords plugged into it leading to different houses.

We stayed in a cave hotel in Goreme where I refused to turn the light on in the bathroom.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:01 PM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

Not surprised to see Vietnam on that list. I have a photo on a drive somewhere of a very similar Cthulu of wires atop a utility pole. How they are ever serviced is beyond me.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:04 PM on January 2, 2017

Lots of fun showers in my past. One involved climbing naked into the engine room of the 100 year old iron boat I was living in and firing up the diesel engine while standing in the fuel soaked bilge (naked so you would not get your clothes dirty) so the engine could heat the water ,you controlled the shower water temp by adjusting flow.
posted by boilermonster at 10:05 PM on January 2, 2017 [11 favorites]

Our kitchen reno included discovery of knob and tube, circuits on multiple breakers and live lampcord with bare ends right below the surface of the plaster. Almost put a nail in that spot the year before.

I started the jreplacement job myself. Never have I been more happy to throw in the towel and hand off to the pros.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 12:36 AM on January 3, 2017

What's not to understand about British bathrooms? Water and electricity do not go together, so the rules keep them apart, either via sufficient distance or using waterproof enclosures.
posted by pharm at 1:21 AM on January 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

Is there no mention of Halliburton?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 1:39 AM on January 3, 2017 [5 favorites]

Those Vietnamese street scenes are par for the course in SE Asia. Riding into Bangkok on the train, you can barely see the buildings for the wires running alongside them.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 1:47 AM on January 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

What's not to understand about British bathrooms? Water and electricity do not go together, so the rules keep them apart, either via sufficient distance or using waterproof enclosures.

Well the waterproof enclosure seems to consist of the entire bathroom, which may be overkill. Much of the rest of the world puts things like light switches and power outlets in the bathroom without issue, which makes things like using hair clippers or a hairdryer way more sensibly achieved. A risk averse approach is fine but when so many other places prove it's not an issue maybe things are being done more out of orthodoxy than safety.
posted by deadwax at 2:39 AM on January 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

Light switch is always outside the WC in Japan, which I think is more for the potential for hijinx than for safety rules (given that a plurality of WC's also have a power heated seat/bottom washer plugged into an outlet right next to the crapper itself).
posted by oheso at 4:28 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Is there no mention of Halliburton?

da FUQ?!?!?!?!
posted by oheso at 4:28 AM on January 3, 2017

I once lived in an apartment that had its whole electricity supported on the doorbell. I didn't even know this was possible. The power cuts were regular, several times a week, if not once or twice a day. Of course, I rented the place and the rent was low, so the owner couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. It threw sparks, it sizzled, and made the noise unlike to an old worn out desktop computer. But strangely the house is still standing and there were no fires ...
posted by sapagan at 4:29 AM on January 3, 2017

I lived in a three room shack in Maryland that had been built by a "handy" guy (the brother of the landlord, a retired shop teacher). The house next door was owned by the same family and built by the same guy. The code violation horrors in both houses were legion, but one if my favorites was when some work needed to be done on the other house, they opened up a wall and some of the electrical wiring had been done with speaker wire.

Those places were both death traps and our landlady was constantly asking me and my husband when we were going to have a baby. Uh, when we can afford to move away from the house with no heat that is actively trying to kill us?
posted by soren_lorensen at 4:40 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

The English seem to have a phobic aversion to power outlets in the bathroom, which I've never been able to extract a good reason for (we have them here, we use 240V, no one dies).

From 1950 until the early 1970s (when the majority of houses were brought up to the new codes) the number of deaths in the UK caused by electric shocks ran at a rate of about 1 per week. In the years since the death rate has lowered to around 2 or 3 per year, so altogether the regulations have saved around 2000 lives.

A drop in the ocean compared to road deaths, but then every one of these is 100% preventable.
posted by Lanark at 6:04 AM on January 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

Much of the rest of the world puts things like light switches and power outlets in the bathroom without issue, which makes things like using hair clippers or a hairdryer way more sensibly achieved.

Light switches can be in the bathroom - they just have to be a pull-cord with a plastic break in the middle somewhere so that even if the cord gets wet you can’t make a complete circuit that includes you pulling the cord.

Hairdryers in the bathroom near the wet areas are an electrocution waiting to happen. This is one of those “oh it’ll never happen to *me*” risks that people ignore because, well, they think it won’t happen to them, so they discount the terrible consequences. Is it really so terrible to dry your hair in the bedroom like a civilised person?
posted by pharm at 7:32 AM on January 3, 2017

The English seem to have a phobic aversion to power outlets in the bathroom, which I've never been able to extract a good reason for

I'm guessing that it happened like so many other things: there was a Dreadful Tragedy (Lord X Electrocuted In Bath!) which led to a change in regulations, and now that's just the way things are done round here, despite the fact that things like RCBs make it a lot safer.

My personal favourite, in a house we once owned, was a cable that came out of the floor and terminated in a plug that was plugged into a socket on the wall. It turned out that the cable was bringing power from downstairs, and the plug was live, supplying power through the socket. The house had several other 'ingenious' electrical fittings as well.

(But I'm always a bit nervous around US two-prong plugs, which always seem loose in the socket and tend to spark alarmingly. And what's with those weird switches on bedside lamps, the little stalk that you have to turn? I guess everyone else's ways of doing things seem a little strange...)
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 7:42 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm more concerned about him falling off the damned ladder, to be honest.

I have absolutely seen #9 used as a slideshow illustration in a safety presentation at work. Probably more than once. It's comedy gold if we assume that he made it down safely and changed his terrible ladder-using ways afterward.
posted by asperity at 7:43 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Hairdryers in the bathroom near the wet areas are an electrocution waiting to happen.

Building codes in the US require GFCI anywhere that electronics might come in contact with water. So, bathrooms and kitchens, for the most part. They prevent the vast majority of problems that might arise from using hairdryers in the bathroom.

But I'm always a bit nervous around US two-prong plugs, which always seem loose in the socket and tend to spark alarmingly.

Plugs are plugs. What makes me nervous is the combination of those spiraling CFL bulbs with the Edison mounts that all of our light fixtures use. I'm surprised those don't break during replacement more often.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:51 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I moved to the UK 18 months ago from Canada. I, too, find UK attitudes to electricity-and-water confounding. GFCI, and arc-fault breakers, are not exactly new technology. I LIKE electric shavers, and electric toothbrushes, and not having loud annoying hair dryers used anywhere but the bathroom where the rest of the primping happens anyway because that's the only place that has a decent mirror. Even if the mirror is always fogged up, because the the shower fan - which is, astoundingly, on the same circuit as the light - has a terrible airflow rating, like every other shower fan in the country.

And civilized people dry their hair in the bathroom, not the bedroom, so they don't have to walk through their house with wet hair (like animals) or with a wet towel (like animals).
posted by Fraxas at 8:35 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Ah yes, the "boutique" hotel in Poznan, Poland, I stayed in about 3 years ago ...

It was a very nice Communist era hotel with lots of art deco trim, but in the wake of 1989 such hotels got left behind a bit in the maintenance and upgrade department.

It wasn't the mains cable (fetchingly dressed in masking tape) sticking out of the wall next to the light switch that made me go to the front desk and ask for another room at 2am on the second night; it was the way the light bulb in the ceiling in front of the bathroom kept flickering despite being switched off.
posted by cstross at 8:42 AM on January 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

at least in the US, most hairdryers sold this century have leetle GFCI circuits built into them.

more importantly...if you want to see even more exotic examples of wiring, may I recommend the book "Your Old Wiring" by David E Shapiro? He makes a useful differentiation between wiring that has always been badly done, wiring which was correctly done then and is terrifying now, and wiring that was fine then but has aged...badly. Did you know that you don't actually need high heat to turn a support beam into charcoal? Elevated heat over a period of decades is just fine for pyrolysis!
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:42 AM on January 3, 2017 [8 favorites]

Thank you so much for that book tip, Ivan!
posted by groda at 9:28 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

From 1950 until the early 1970s (when the majority of houses were brought up to the new codes) the number of deaths in the UK caused by electric shocks ran at a rate of about 1 per week. In the years since the death rate has lowered to around 2 or 3 per year, so altogether the regulations have saved around 2000 lives.

A drop in the ocean compared to road deaths, but then every one of these is 100% preventable.

Is the rate of deaths from bathroom electrocution significantly higher in continental Europe/Australia (where they have 220V mains sockets in bathrooms)?
posted by acb at 9:58 AM on January 3, 2017

Plugs are plugs.

Not all plugs are created equal.
posted by the latin mouse at 10:05 AM on January 3, 2017

Hairdryers in the bathroom near the wet areas are an electrocution waiting to happen

Are you using the hair dryer in a bath full of water or over a sink full of water? Because I use a hair dryer after I get done with the bath and not near any running or standing water.
posted by LizBoBiz at 10:22 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Many years ago when we first moved into our current house I was ill, and something in the house was making me sicker yet, I lost my temper and started yelling in frustration when thing N went wrong, and just as the buzzing of the window closest to me in its casement reached a peak, the lights went out.

When I went down to the circuit panel in the basement, I found that no individual breaker had tripped, but the whole-house breaker needed to be reset.

We never found the flaw in our wiring and it hasn't happened again, but it cured me of really raising my voice, no matter what the provocation.
posted by jamjam at 10:25 AM on January 3, 2017

You can pretty much stick a UK plug into any environment, as most (if not all) of the mains cables have a fuse built into the plug.

I am not an expert. I think it's a great idea to have fuses in the plugs for individual appliances.

But on a scale of milliseconds, fuses take a long time to act, whereas you can be shocked or killed pretty fast. My understanding is that fuses are fire prevention, not shock prevention.

My point is: please don't make any safety decisions on the principle that a fuse will keep you safe from electrocution. RCB/RCCD/GFCIs are intended to prevent electrocution.

The excellent bigclive video linked upthread makes it clear that the "suicide shower" concept could in principle be made safe if it were designed and installed carefully, but they apparently are used mostly because they are cheap. So in practice the designs are weak and the installation works around design problems, and what suffers is safety.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:56 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

This made me think of the Naval Safety Center's Photo of the Week site. It's the reason I'm a safety wet blanket.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:12 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Not all plugs are created equal.

I'm a Scottish nationalist and not at all fond of great swathes of British culture. But by god I love our plugs.
posted by Happy Dave at 11:16 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Before I could sell my mother's house an inspector told us that we had to replace our Federal Pacific breaker boxes.

For a long time (1950s-1980s) Federal Pacific Electric was one of the most popular manufacturers of electrical panels in the United States. And they were installed in millions of homes.

But these panels are extremely unsafe.

Why they’re unsafe: FPE electric panels’ circuit breakers fail to trip when they should (when there’s a short circuit or circuit overload). This problem has lead to thousands of fires across the United States, including this one in Central Florida.

There are also many reports that FPE circuits in the off position still send power to the circuit. This can cause electrocution when working on a circuit you believe to be off.

How to tell if you have one: FPE panels are most common in homes built between 1950 and 1980. Federal Pacific Electric will likely be written on the cover of your breaker box. Inside, look for the name Stab-Loc (the brand name of the circuit breakers).

Not to mention that the house still had fabric wrapped solid core wiring in the lathe and plaster walls. Good riddance.
posted by Splunge at 11:19 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm always a bit nervous around US two-prong plugs, which always seem loose in the socket and tend to spark alarmingly.

Yep, as a British guy living in the US two-prong plugs freak me out slightly; they always seem to seat poorly and wobble their way out slightly exposing slivers of live prongs, in a way that three-prong plugs don't. And they share the USB "keyed connection that looks unkeyed" problem -- one pin is wider than the other -- so you often end up having to try to insert it twice.

(FWIW, ungrounded appliances in the UK use three-pin plugs with a plastic earth pin, so you still get the firmer mechanical connection of three pins in the socket.)

US extension cords also often look impossibly flimsy to me.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:21 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Having recently had all the electric receptacles in my house replaced, I can tell you that modern US style receptacles are not loosey-goosey, they are maddeningly difficult to get a plug into. My parents have old receptacles from the 50s and they are kind of terrifying, but new ones are very snug. Like, kinda too snug. And GFCI has to go into any place even remotely near any water of any kind, per code.
posted by soren_lorensen at 11:27 AM on January 3, 2017

And they share the USB "keyed connection that looks unkeyed" problem -- one pin is wider than the other -- so you often end up having to try to insert it twice.

That's because the polarized plugs with one wider prong are a fairly new development and they were designed so that the outlets would be backwards compatible with older non-polarized plugs.
posted by octothorpe at 11:44 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Dang, I wish I'd seen the links for "suicide showers" before spending a week in Costa Rica last summer. Mine had exposed wiring, and we had to figure it out by trial and error. Our first showers were ice-cold. The second day, we figured out how to get it to room temperature. Nobody ever accomplished "warm," much less "hot," at least not without compromising water pressure.
posted by jhope71 at 12:48 PM on January 3, 2017

Aside from the literal circuit board and the one with the red wires among all the meters most of these don't even seem that crazy to me. Apparently I should have been documenting more of the crazy wiring I ran into while working in the trades/travelling in Asia.

Some of the jury-rigged knob-and-tube assemblages you'll run into in deferred maintenance housing of a certain vintage . . . oof.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:53 PM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I LIKE electric shavers, and electric toothbrushes

There’s an electric shaver point in my completely to code (signed off by two different electricians at different times, so it better be) UK bathroom. I think I’ve seen a shaver point in every hotel room bathroom I’ve ever used in the UK. You can plug your electric toothbrush into them too.

UK electricity regulations are not some bathroom fearing nopetopus.
posted by pharm at 1:01 PM on January 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

bathroom fearing nopetopus

my new band name
posted by some loser at 1:06 PM on January 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

Tangentially related: I'm in the process of renovating and reopening a small cafe that is situated within a complex of car dealerships. We'll mostly be serving breakfast and lunch plates to the delearship staff, mechanics, valets, and customers waiting on car repairs. It's a swanky little outfit. Mini, Lexus, Audi, BMW, Porsche, Land Rover. Even a damn Maserati dealership. I can sell these folks cheeseburgers, right?

Today as I was elbow-deep cleaning out a deep-fryer, I was struck by a thought: where's the grease trap? I gotta clean that out pronto, because if the last guy left his fryers in this pitiful condition, I'm sure he didn't do the twice-monthly chore of cleaning the grease trap. So I asked.

The site manager sighed. He pointed to a locked door marked IT DEPARTMENT ONLY. I was like, you have got to be kidding me. He shook his head and unlocked the door. And there, sitting on the floor of THE FACILITY'S MAIN SERVER ROOM, is my cafe's grease trap.

Jesus Christ.

And I can't clean the damn thing while they're open, the stench will drive people screaming from the building. I just hope it doesn't back up before I can get to it on Sunday. No idea what they were thinking or how that's even code-compliant. Ugh.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 1:31 PM on January 3, 2017 [8 favorites]

I thought it said "World's Worst Writing" and came to see if Morrissey was mentioned.
posted by 4ster at 1:42 PM on January 3, 2017

Living in Hong Kong I didn't understand why all my colleagues insisted on unplugging all electrical things every day for fear of fire. It seemed like OCD overkill to me. That is, I didn't understand until a problem with one light bulb in the bathroom caused nearly every light bulb in my house to blow and fried my washing machine. And I live in a new modern building. So now I turn off everything every day like everyone else...
posted by frumiousb at 2:07 PM on January 3, 2017

UK bathroom shaver points are low voltage (110?) and current limited, they can't run a hair dryer or anything with a normal plug. In terms of normal 13A outlets the electrical code is very much a nopetopus.

The fuses in plugs are to protect the wiring and prevent fires, they don't do anything to prevent electrocution, which goes for all fuses really.
posted by deadwax at 2:37 PM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Today as I was elbow-deep cleaning out a deep-fryer, I was struck by a thought: where's the grease trap? I gotta clean that out pronto, because if the last guy left his fryers in this pitiful condition, I'm sure he didn't do the twice-monthly chore of cleaning the grease trap. So I asked.

The site manager sighed. He pointed to a locked door marked IT DEPARTMENT ONLY. I was like, you have got to be kidding me. He shook his head and unlocked the door. And there, sitting on the floor of THE FACILITY'S MAIN SERVER ROOM, is my cafe's grease trap.

Jesus Christ.

Here in Seattle a couple of decades ago or so, there was a great and very prosperous little burger seller named Herfy's which had never had or somehow bypassed its grease trap, and by the time the city noticed that, miles of sewer was lined with hamburger grease and Herfy's was looking at a sewer bill of millions of dollars. It closed and never reopened.

If I were you, I'd have my sewer inspected now, while liability can be unambiguously assigned.
posted by jamjam at 2:48 PM on January 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

UK bathroom shaver points are low voltage (110?) and current limited

The most important thing is they're isolated through a transformer. Neither pin is referenced to earth or neutral or ground, so even if you touch a bare wire no current flows through you, because you aren't completing a circuit to ground like you would be if there was a standard non-isolated mains socket provided.
posted by grahamparks at 2:59 PM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

You can pretty much stick a UK plug into any environment, as most (if not all) of the mains cables have a fuse built into the plug.

Fuses exist to stop a short circuit from starting a fire, they won't do much to stop you from getting electrocuted. You can kill someone quite easily without ever exceeding the rating of a typical domestic plug (120 or 240V).

GFCIs, on the other hand, are reasonably useful provided they're set up correctly. They do not seem to be as common outside the US, at least that I've seen, but maybe other countries prefer the ones mounted in the panelbox and not integrated into the outlet...?

Not all plugs are created equal.

Electrical plugs, and their diversity, are pretty neat, because they're a very much form-follows-function sort of thing, and their different designs demonstrate widely varying priorities as various people solved the same basic problem in different times and places.

British small-appliance plugs are big because they were designed from the beginning to contain fuses, and at the time fuses were big, plus under certain conditions the plug/outlet has to handle a lot of current and not burn up before the fuse blows. The per-plug fusing, instead of per-circuit (as is common in the US), is because of the use of "ring mains" in the UK. Ring mains are neat, and let you put a lot more current over a smaller size wire, hence less copper usage in each house. But they have some nasty failure modes without the fuse or breaker at the appliance: the panelbox breaker has to be rated unpleasantly high for the whole thing to work; I think in the UK the panel breakers/fuses for the circuits powering regular outlets on a ring mains are something like 230V 32A! You don't want to dump that through your misbehaving toaster—so each appliance has its own lower-rated fuse.

The US NEC basically assumes you'll use a lot of wire and "home run" various lighting and outlet circuits back to the panelbox, and if you daisy-chain multiple outlets off of the same circuit, you're OK with the total chain not exceeding the relatively low single-outlet maximum (of 15 or 20A, typically). The result is that the plugs can be much smaller and flimsier, because they're essentially protected by the circuit fuse to a much greater degree, in a way that British ones aren't.

It's something of a tradeoff. The NEC puts the onus on the building wiring to protect appliances, which are allowed to be cheap-n-cheerful with their crummy little unfused plugs, while the British standards allow building wiring which—in the presence of a poorly-designed unfused appliance—could be pretty hazardous, but by putting that onus on appliances allows a significant savings in materials. I'm not sure if either approach is obviously better.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:09 PM on January 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

A fun thing in our rented house in Pakistan was the outside doorbell, as was typical it was mounted on the wall surrounding the house facing the street. It was apparently wired to the 220 and attached to a very loud buzzer in the house.
Normally when wallas came to the house they would lean long and hard on the buzzer which was annoying as fuck.
We discovered during the short rainy season that pressing the buzzer when the ground was wet would give you a pretty good shock, so you could tell if it was raining if the the buzzer just went "ak" instead of "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaak".

This was in addition to the skylight that diverted a creek load of water down the hall and out the front door during heavy rain, fortunately the house was entirely concrete.
posted by boilermonster at 11:55 PM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

There’s an electric shaver point in my completely to code (signed off by two different electricians at different times, so it better be) UK bathroom. I think I’ve seen a shaver point in every hotel room bathroom I’ve ever used in the UK. You can plug your electric toothbrush into them too.

Though there isn't and cannot be enough voltage/current to run a hairdryer off. Which is inconvenient, because the bathroom is a far more convenient place to dry one's hair than a bedroom or the kitchenette. (Incidentally, the prohibition on power points near water doesn't apply to kitchens; which makes it look more like “safety theatre” than anything rational. Something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done.)

(And of course there's the UK's notoriously laxly regulated private tenancy sector, where houses are often renovated and subdivided with scant regard for the strict regulations. The first place in London I lived in was subdivided into bedrooms, each of which had a sink and mirror with a 220V power socket right next to it. Somehow I survived, and to the best of my knowledge, so did all the other tenants. Perhaps Baroness Thatcher and her successors regarded buy-to-let tenants as dispensable?)

Anyway, unless bathroom hairdryer/straightener/shaver fatalities are an order of magnitude higher across the English Channel and the continentals have resigned themselves to that as a fact of life, I'm not convinced that British regulations are not excessive.
posted by acb at 2:03 AM on January 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

The US NEC basically assumes you'll use a lot of wire and "home run" various lighting and outlet circuits back to the panelbox, and if you daisy-chain multiple outlets off of the same circuit, you're OK with the total chain not exceeding the relatively low single-outlet maximum (of 15 or 20A, typically). The result is that the plugs can be much smaller and flimsier, because they're essentially protected by the circuit fuse to a much greater degree, in a way that British ones aren't.

Are the Eurasian and Australian/NZ standards organised along the same lines?
posted by acb at 2:10 AM on January 4, 2017

Australian outlets are lower current (10A) than the british ones, generally daisy-chained into 30A circuits with breakers back at the box. There's live + neutral + a solid core earth wire, These days pretty much everything has an RCD. Lighting circuits are lower current and don't need an earth, I think. I Am Not An Electrician.

Bathrooms and kitchens can have normal outlets so long as they're a certain distance from and above wet areas.

Those smart lightbulbs actually start to make sense when you consider how much copper you'd save not running wires down the wall to the switch and back ... instead you could just daisy-chain all the lights in the entire house into one long always-on chain and have the Internet sort out the details :-).
posted by nickzoic at 3:22 AM on January 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

daisy-chain all the lights in the entire house into one long always-on chain and have the Internet sort out the details

Lighting run by 4chan? Where do I sign?
posted by flabdablet at 3:56 AM on January 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

GFCIs, on the other hand, are reasonably useful provided they're set up correctly. They do not seem to be as common outside the US, at least that I've seen, but maybe other countries prefer the ones mounted in the panelbox and not integrated into the outlet...?

Current UK electrical standards require GFCIs at the panel: one per circuit plus a master one for the entire panel IIRC.
posted by pharm at 4:21 AM on January 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm British and just wired a mains relay to my gas boiler, all of which is in my bathroom.

I've been using variations of that sentence since the weekend to freak people out. Christmas holiday projects are the best projects.
posted by vbfg at 5:07 AM on January 4, 2017 [2 favorites]