I recently had an electrician come by to add some sockets in a room where there were already two installed. He's done some wiring to create a ring circuit with those sockets. However, when I checked other sockets in the house later, they seemed to be dead. It turns out that the polarity in those sockets is reversed. The electrician claims there must be a fault elsewhere, suggesting I pay him for fault-finding at his hourly rate. I'm a bit skeptical and not sure how this situation could arise since the existing sockets looked fine before he started. Is there a way for me to check if the problem was actually present before his work?
1 Answer
If those outlets were working fine before the electrician came in, it's quite likely that something went wrong during his work. Even if the polarity is reversed on the new sockets, they should still function unless he really messed up the wiring somewhere by creating a loop. That said, this is a fairly straightforward job, and you should be cautious about him wanting to charge you extra to find the fault. It might be worth letting him check it out to see what's actually going on, but be sure to sort out the payment based on what he finds.
When you mention 'something created during the process,' do you mean there was definitely an error made? Or could it be that there was a pre-existing issue that just became apparent because he did the job right? I can't quite figure out how this happened.