Dull Men's Club
An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.
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Sounds familiar... my previous house had old storage heaters at some point in the past. Before I bought it, central heating had been installed and the old storage heaters removed.
I found they had installed a secondary consumer unit for the storage heaters, and so had that disconnected fully. But they'd left all of the old boxes on the walls with old cabling in trunking when the house was rewired before proper standards banned running it all down the walls.
So when I did the bathroom, I had to remove one of these old disconnected boxes and patch some tiling. So I got the box off, went to cut the wires with my wire cutters... and thank fuck I was using insulated ones... Because... BANG!!! sparks and a very shocked (not literally) expression on my face.
For some reason... this box was still wired into the main consumer unit. I pulled the fuse to it completely as it was only for that and nothing else. And was having a new consumer unit fitted anyway as the house was going to be sold and I wanted it all sorted.
Then the electrician fitting the new consumer unit... found that the entire ground for the whole of the houses electrics... had been disconnected at some point in the past.
I'd lived there for over 12yrs and could have been killed at any point.
I'm assuming you're in the UK, where they have consumer units, which we call "breaker boxes" or "main panels" in the USA.
This is one thing I wish we would improve in USA electrical work, which is to test the whole installation even if only one part of the house wiring has been worked on. In the USA, the typical workflow for a new sub panel would be for the electrician to pull a permit, do initial "rough in" work, have the municipal inspector come review, do the full work, and then inspector would come to review and sign-off the final work.
But as far as I'm aware, there's no requirement to assess the minimum safety of the entire house, in case there were gremlins in the existing wiring, of the type that would be illegal no matter the time they were installed. No tests for ground/earth resistance. No tests for swapped line/neutral. Quite frankly, no electrical tests at all, and everything is more about inspecting the physical wiring.
That said, inspector will check that all bedrooms have smoke alarms. So at least there's that...
I'm not an electrician, but all 'new' electrical work here in the UK requires a certified electrician carries out and signs of on the work. They can inspect and test existing electrics, but only to say if it meets minimum standards or not and is safe to use.
On my current house, we converted a garage and utility room into a bedroom and ensuite for my mum. Even though there were some electrics (2 sockets and 3 lights), we effectively had it all redone from scratch, with the electrics for that entire job placed on it's own 'breaker'
I then had another bedroom and ensuite reworked, not really much in the way of new wiring... mostly just moving existing stuff around (sockets, switches and isolators for extractors), but still signed of and certified by an electrician.
Redoing existing electrics is fine, so you can replace switches and sockets, light fittings and so forth without any issues.