I’ve been recently making some DIY electrical work at home. Nothing fancy, since I know my limits and my limited knowledge of the matter. Mostly lightning and replacing the ubiquitous tape connections with Wago style connectors. Also fixing less ubiquitous but more worrying copper nudism here and there.
Is it common for houses here to not have junction boxes in the walls? Our building is less than 20 years old and no junction boxes that I could find. Usually there are wires and wire connections going through plugs, switches and lighting fixtures boxes.
I haven’t tried to run new cables through walls yet, but without junction boxes I believe it’ll be a nightmare.
I also want to upgrade our consumer unit. We need one or two more circuits to plug some hungry appliances (oven, microwave, rice cooker…). We currently have 7 circuits. As far as I understand two of them are RCBO while the other 5 are just regular MCB. We called an electrician to add the circuits for those heavy load appliances and asked him about replacing the MCBs for RCBOs. From what I overheard (it was my wife at the phone) and what my wife told me afterwards, he doesn’t recommend RCBO because they can trip making impossible to use that circuit. I told my wife that if that happens is because the installation has an issue that we should sort it out and better to know it than to live (or maybe die) in ignorance.
Is this another example of Taiwanese consciously choosing less safety to reduce the risk of a potential mafan? I don’t know, I think an electric shock would be more mafan.
Or it is just a way to acknowledge that electrical installations are very chabuduo and anything picky like a safety item will show all the chabuduoism in all it’s glory?
I’ve been checking grounding today with a multimeter. Apparently everything it’s fine here.
Although I discovered an outlet with inversed polarity. I’ll fix that tomorrow, hopefully it’s the reason why the light switch near it doesn’t work. I thought it was from a light source we had cancelled but I installed a light bulb and it’s still not working (that switch, the light works through another switch). Although it doesn’t look like it’s a two way switch and everything in the room is working. Will see.
I didn’t have many hopes on this. Outlet is fixed, switch is cut from the current. I threw a wire guide to try to find where the cables go from the switch and it looks like at some point during the small reform that the previous owners did, someone wanted to install a light source somewhere on top of the bed. Then another someone, or maybe the same one, forgot to make a hole. At some point words like 沒關係,差不多,沒辦法 and/or 算了 were spoken. So I killed the switch.
I would like to link it to the main ceiling light, but who knows if there is a path for the wires.
One example that comes to mind is that people in Taiwan don’t seem to understand the difference between two-plug connectors and (grounded) three-plug ones. It’s common to just buy an adaptor from three-plug to two-plug.
Some photos of my consumer unit. I don’t even know what to say.
So, can you recommend me an electrician near Tamsui that would not look at me in disbelief when I say that this is awful? I don’t want to hear any “這張很正常” nor any of that similar BS.
