AAY                              A holiday house on the cliff

This story refers to a lot of years ago.  Jeanne, the two girls, and I had a holiday in Tintagel in the ground floor of a house built on the cliff.  Claire had not arrived then so there were just the four of us.  The plumbing and other amenities were rather basic, but it suited our purse.  A day or so after we arrived, Jeanne was washing one of the children in the sink when a shriek alerted Jeanne that something was wrong.  Jeanne went to turn the tap off and found the cause of the alarm -- the tap was live.

I always used to carry a few tools with me and I was duly summoned to do my husbandly duty.  I found nothing.  Jeanne was adamant that she had got a shock off the tap.  A little while later she got another shock from the tap.  This time I confirmed that the tap was alive.  One of my tools was a neon screwdriver.  I got a full light,

Nothing that I was aware of had changed in our part of the house so I approached the people upstairs.  "Yes" they had just finished using the electric kettle.  It didn't take me long to find that the kettle element was passing a heavy current to earth.  At least, it should have been to earth.  The original wiring used the water pipe as it main earth.  But the house was fed using alkathene plastic piping, so any current fed to the water pipe livened up every bit of plumbing in the house without making any connection to true earth

I imagine someone had boiled the kettle dry and caused the element to connect to the body.  I went into town and bought a new element and fitted it to the kettle.  I wrote a letter to the house owner enclosing the receipt for the element, and told them what I had done.  This was before RCDs came on the market, but there were devices that monitored the voltage of an earth wire with respect to an independent earth, and if the voltage rose to 30V, it would trip the supply.  This is what that house should have had.  I left it to the house-owner to make the arrangements.  I hope they did