Let's start with the main one! Happy Energy Day! Anyone who is in any way connected with electricity! Health, good luck, safe work!

Our company somehow took an order - to do electrical installation in a hefty shopping complex under construction.

Yes, bad luck came out ... The management apparently decided to save money and did not increase the size of the brigade. They wanted six electricians to do all the work in 3 months ... We were "put" on a bet, which means they killed all interest in working faster in order to earn more.

As a result, of course, we did not have time to hand over the object by the deadline. Our greedy executives had to subcontract a competing firm. The guys did it pretty quickly (they were paid almost twice as much as ours).

When they left the object, very funny jambs began to come out, which for some reason we eliminated, and not them ...

The lights on the stairs don't work.

The guys left the facility before voltage was applied to the installed lines. How did they get the job? Don't know!

When we turned on the lighting on the flights of stairs, it turned out that only one lamp on the first floor was working ... And the rest?

They opened all the lamps - the voltage does not reach ... And neither the phase, nor zero, nor the earth “rings” ... They thought that they were powered from some other group ... But no!

And only when we started to hammer the freshly painted walls, it turned out that only 10-15 cm of cable were laid in the wall from each lamp. In the riser, there was no main cable at all (it only reached the first lamp, which was the only one lit ...)

Why is the display not lit

Even more fun came with the information boards in the underground parking.

When we powered the parking lot, none of us doubted that some jambs would come out here too. But what is….?

So. They put pressure on. Everything works except for the dashboards. They thought it was the same jamb as with the stairs ... But no! Zero comes, the Earth comes, but there is no phase!

The phase is gone from the machine ... but on the very first box it is no longer there! They opened the trays, pulled the cable along the entire line - the cable is whole! In desperation, they even cut the insulation in several places! The situation is the same! Zero and the Earth are there, but there is not even a hint of a phase.

And then, it occurred to someone to remake the tip on the phase core of this cable in the shield: he bit off a couple of centimeters, stripped the insulation, put on a new tip, put it into the machine, turned it on.

Oh miracle!!! Everything is working!

When we looked at the bitten off piece of wire with a tip, even those who had never heard a bad word cursed! Some scoundrel pulled the tip right on the INSULATION of the core, not bothering to clean its edge !!! I put the tip into the machine, clamped it. Visually everything was OK. But in fact ... we lost a whole day searching.

Where's the copper, Billy?

It will not be a big discovery for anyone that electricians are frequent visitors to non-ferrous metal collection points. Well, what ... an illiquid copper from time to time accumulates ... Why not hand it over?

Here is the story with the same subcontractors:

Our colleagues used a suspiciously large amount of cable. They weren’t caught hot, so they didn’t steal.

A couple of weeks after their departure, one of ours was pulling the lighting cable through the hollow channel of the floor slab. The room where he worked was located exactly under the former change house of colleagues.

He made a hole in the slab near the wall with a perforator and two holes in the center of the room. From the holes appeared ... cable insulation. I made a few more holes in the same channel ... and it is tightly packed with insulation !!! The same situation with neighboring channels!!!

It turned out that these clever people made several holes in the floor of their change house and hid unnecessary insulation in the channels, and quietly took out the copper!!! Then cemented and everything! Don't dig! Of course, we didn’t say anything about the find to the authorities ... But we took the method into service :)  

Life hack How to stretch the cable

And yet, good things remained from colleagues. They taught us one simple, quick and easy way to pull a cable through pipes and voids in slabs.

In addition to other power tools, they also had a vacuum cleaner. An old one ... The rocket was called. He could not only suck in air, but also pump it. This is what they used

I'll tell you on the example of broach through the voids in the slab.

They made two holes in the channel. They crumpled a piece of newspaper into a ball. A nylon thread was tied to it. They put the ball into one of the holes and blew into this hole with a vacuum cleaner. The ball had no choice but to follow along with the entire flow of air. Since there was only one exit from the channel, the ball flew into it.

And then I think you already guessed it: a cable was tied to the thread and pulled out along with the thread. If the length was long or the cable was thick, first a steel wire was pulled with a thread and only then it was used as a “broaching”.