bullheimer
Senior Member
- Location
- WA
Unless the electrician was grossly negligent or had malice, i would say it is the Electrical contractors liability 100%. note, i am not a lawyer. but you would be surprised how many lawyers will take personal injury cases for free unless they win the case. just because somebody is dirt poor doesn't mean they aren't able to sue you.
I know of a sign company here in mt vermin, wa, where the owner of a car lot put up his own neon, that used to be installed at a former location. he called SM (not real name) sign company to install one small section that he had trouble with. more of a repair. this was in one small corner of a large building and they had NOTHING to do with any of the other neon/transformers anything, on the rest of the building.
the building caught fire on the opposite end of the building from where SM was working and burned it up pretty good. They sued SM and won 50% damages under this logic: Since SM had qualified personnel on site, they should have seen that there was faulty wiring there, and were therefor partially responsible.
imho, if you want to help the elderly, either help them directly for free or next to nothing, or have that non profit hire you to do their work. it sounds to me like a pant-load.
i have just yesterday an almost same situation but completely different. found 12g wires landed on 30A breaker. they were warm. w/o checking amperage i put them on a 20A bkr. a few hours later owner calls to tell me his ice cream machine keeps tripping bkr. i knew what it was. so i went back to put in a 25A bkr and that is when i measured the amps: it was drawing 27.5, so the 25A breaker wouldn't work. i told him i can't put the 30 back in, but he could. well, i ended up doing it and said to him i am not liable for any burnt up wires (i had earlier that day pulled 4 feet of wire out of an underground conduit that was burned in half). he agreed, after all it was ice cream in a Drive In so... plus it had worked on that bkr since he bought the place 10 years ago. The bottom line for me was simply that i knew for sure that the wiring was in underground metal raceway the whole entire way to the 240/30A recept. No fire hazard i can see. Plus that he is having the ice cream machine tech come in on tuesday to check it out. It says it is only supposed to draw 17A total. So since i did all this on the phone, with no texts and no paper trail, i am leaving myself subject to his honesty and nothing more. If his machine burns up or the wires do, he could very well make me replace them. It comes down, i guess, to being a good judge of character. If i didn't think he was honest, i would have just left the 20 in place and told him too bad about his ice cream. But then, maybe he would have stopped payment on his $1200 check! Just another example of No good deed going Unpunished. But then, according to the above, if i had done nothing, then i should have done something, like removing the 30A breaker. So..... that is why i did it in the first place. I was thinking of the story about the sign company. But i tell you, our local inspectors turn a blind eye to stuff like that on every 100 year old home i pull a permit to run one or two new circuits in, and i know there isn't anybody out there that doesn't know that to be true.
I know of a sign company here in mt vermin, wa, where the owner of a car lot put up his own neon, that used to be installed at a former location. he called SM (not real name) sign company to install one small section that he had trouble with. more of a repair. this was in one small corner of a large building and they had NOTHING to do with any of the other neon/transformers anything, on the rest of the building.
the building caught fire on the opposite end of the building from where SM was working and burned it up pretty good. They sued SM and won 50% damages under this logic: Since SM had qualified personnel on site, they should have seen that there was faulty wiring there, and were therefor partially responsible.
imho, if you want to help the elderly, either help them directly for free or next to nothing, or have that non profit hire you to do their work. it sounds to me like a pant-load.
i have just yesterday an almost same situation but completely different. found 12g wires landed on 30A breaker. they were warm. w/o checking amperage i put them on a 20A bkr. a few hours later owner calls to tell me his ice cream machine keeps tripping bkr. i knew what it was. so i went back to put in a 25A bkr and that is when i measured the amps: it was drawing 27.5, so the 25A breaker wouldn't work. i told him i can't put the 30 back in, but he could. well, i ended up doing it and said to him i am not liable for any burnt up wires (i had earlier that day pulled 4 feet of wire out of an underground conduit that was burned in half). he agreed, after all it was ice cream in a Drive In so... plus it had worked on that bkr since he bought the place 10 years ago. The bottom line for me was simply that i knew for sure that the wiring was in underground metal raceway the whole entire way to the 240/30A recept. No fire hazard i can see. Plus that he is having the ice cream machine tech come in on tuesday to check it out. It says it is only supposed to draw 17A total. So since i did all this on the phone, with no texts and no paper trail, i am leaving myself subject to his honesty and nothing more. If his machine burns up or the wires do, he could very well make me replace them. It comes down, i guess, to being a good judge of character. If i didn't think he was honest, i would have just left the 20 in place and told him too bad about his ice cream. But then, maybe he would have stopped payment on his $1200 check! Just another example of No good deed going Unpunished. But then, according to the above, if i had done nothing, then i should have done something, like removing the 30A breaker. So..... that is why i did it in the first place. I was thinking of the story about the sign company. But i tell you, our local inspectors turn a blind eye to stuff like that on every 100 year old home i pull a permit to run one or two new circuits in, and i know there isn't anybody out there that doesn't know that to be true.
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