Regarding electrical safety there is certainly some need to warn the innocent, the ignorant, and the foolhardy about hazards involved with electrical installation, repair, and investigation. However, I do think there are two unfortunate results of the excessive, repetitive warnings encouraged by the safety industry and our suing society. One is that the public is led away from common sense and a desire to understand electrical things, away from normal confidence and courage, into a general paranoia. The other result can be a disdain for any printed cautions because they are seen to be merely generic and needed to satisfy lawyers and insurance companies, and because they can in fact usually be ignored without harm.
Experience tells many of us that warning statements containing the verb, "may", can be translated just as well by "very rarely". Indeed using a product improperly may cause serious injury or death; on the other hand, we can get away with a lot of supposed misuse without a problem, and it is sometimes convenient to do so in spite of risks.
My main warning to those involved in troubleshooting is simply: try to understand your electrical system enough to avoid shocks, and even when you think you have turned off the right things, treat them, if possible, as if they might still be "live".
If you should happen to get shocked in spite of your best informed efforts, hopefully it will be a wake-up call to learn from. The fact that I have been mildly shocked a number of times has made me more aware and a better electrician. I have not gotten used to being shocked, but I honestly must tell you that most shocks are mild and are not life-threatening.
The other usual electrical warning aims at fire hazard. It is true that electrical practices mandated by the National Electrical Code are especially designed to reduce the risk of fires due to electrical installations. I am of the opinion that the likelihood of building combustion directly due to poorly done electrical systems is portrayed as much higher than statistics would reveal, if exact statistics on this were abundant, available, and interpreted carefully. See What Is An Electrical Fire?. When there is no other obvious cause, fire investigators do often call it electrical, when there is no such positive evidence. See this Forensic company's page. It would in fact be difficult to purposely start a fire by intentionally shoddy work.
During a given year in my area of the U.S., I see about one hundred instances of the most common form of wires overheating at connection points. I can safely say that, combined with the other contractors in the same area, we see at least 1000 of these. Some of them are quite ugly-looking and a few of these might have been capable of starting a fire if other conditions had been favorable. But other conditions were not favorable; that’s why we were able to come to the home -- it was still standing. Yes, we don’t get called to the ones that do start fires. But I believe those amount to less than five instances per year in the same geographic area, and perhaps as little as one. I am willing for fire investigators to bring my expertise into their detective work, but they seem to know all they want to know. So, I contend that a fraction of one percent of these bad connections will start fires, some of which result in deaths. That is enough for the safety industry to justify any product or any regulation that is believed to reduce the statistic.
I believe that the Code and its enforcement are largely justifiable for other reasons alone: operational reliability, shock hazard, and uniformity of practice are rather important. Most electrical conditions that do happen to result in fires would already have violated one of these values. Troubleshooting itself would be much more complicated if there were no established standards of installation. Ignorant homeowners who violate the Code risk not only a measure of fire hazard, but a likelihood of electrical interruptions and subpar performance -- tripping from overloads, deterioration of components, reduced voltage, flickering of lights, etc. These things do not get the monetary attention of the insurance and safety industries, but they deserve prohibition simply in the name of consumer protection.
No one’s work in their own home is simply their own business. Even if they somehow arranged for the house to disappear the moment they die, so that no buyer would have to live with what they have done, they can still be affecting relatives and neighbors by their negligence while they are alive. While I am not of a mind to have a safety police breathing down homeowners’ necks, I oppose slipshod attitudes toward electrical work -- morally. And I oppose it more for its unreliability than its fire hazard, since the latter is rarer.
By this website I hope to encourage responsible homeowners and handymen to learn how to investigate the causes of malfunctions in a home’s electrical system. If a local jurisdiction limits such activity to licensed electricians, you are responsible for how you act in relation to this. While I may not agree with all such restrictions, I am not telling you to step outside the law.
Electrical myths© 2008 Larry Dimock