A Bit of a Shock

Today I had a new back door fitted. It was all going very well. The biggest worry was that the fitter had to remove the burglar alarm vibration sensor from the old door frame and fit it to the new one.

My house is quite old, and this means that there are lots of bits and pieces on the surface that in a new house would be out of sight. For example, the mains cable to connect the power socket in my conservatory (sun room) to the ring main was tacked to the woodwork round the door and went out through a hole in said woodwork. The glazier hid this very neatly behind the cladding round the new door.

I was on standby at the burglar alarm main board as he started to reattach the vibration sensor, since the tamper alarm had gone off several times already. As I watched and waited - KERPOW! Fire shot up and there was a loud bang.

Spencer had forgotten about the now-hidden cable and drilled straight into it!

Bizarrely, this did not even burn out the fuse (no trip-switches in my house!) and we had trouble finding which fuse would isolate the cable. He then had to cut out the damaged piece of cable and splice it together with a connector, before reburying it in the cladding.

Now too afraid to drill in far enough to the cladding to attach the sensor properly, he left it all-but-dangling. It still works, but I guess there is a callout to the burglar alarm engineer in my future. At least it won't be an expensive emergency one, and I don't blame Spencer, because I was expecting that part of the job to go wrong - just not so explosively!

And at least he was uninjured. Unlike his pride.

Oh - and it's not the first time he's done something like that! Luckily it wasn't his last, either...