Thread: Lets get someone killed, dead, permanently

Yesterday, while I was dismantling the electrical system for an above ground pool I ran into two strange things. The was no ground or grid attached anywhere around the metal frame.

But the scary part was the above deck receptacles. They were installed on a 20 amp circuit. 12/2 UF fed the first receptacle and then 14 AWG conductors were back-stabbed to feed the second receptacle at the outlet.

One of the 14 AWG hot conductors insulation had melted completely off of the conductor and was a ground fault. They fixed this failure by running an indoor extension cord under the deck to the opposite side of the pool and connected it to the 14 AWG side of another receptacle outlet.

If I did not know better, I'd swear this was DIY work!

To make matters worse, I saw the approved permit for the pool electrical work. It was dated fifteen years ago, there have been several homeowners since then. So there is no way to know when the failure occured and who fixed it.

Fortunately, The inspector has retired. So obviously we can blame him/her because he/she cannot defend themselves. The current owner complained of getting shocks but no one could find the problem, so he decided to pull the pool out.

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Ah, ha!

Okay, the HI is off the hook! You just have to love DIY folks.

Turns out this pool was originally installed in a neighbor's yard. At some unknown space in time, the neighbor decided to go with an in-ground pool.

At that point, the neighbors got together and dismantled the pool and then moved it to its current location.

It appears to me that they counted on the contact of the pool to earth to be the required ground, however over the course of time, the bottom of the pool sides seriously corroded and the ground connection.

I know this now because I just finished demo-ing the entire pool and deck!

We see scary stuff like this all the time. If a permit exists at all, it will often be for legitimate work done long before Mr. Handy got involved. 100 years of living with electricity, and surprisingly few people have died.

Here's a few pics from last week.

This might have been a case where the DIY'ers called it A "Cement Pond"