Dear All

I am an engineer but do not have a wiremans license since I didnt do the trade test.

I dont do this for a living but I was helping out with cabling and roofing at a friend's house on the weekend.

The electrician (a different friend I hadn't met before) suggest (actually is going to) use flat twin and earth cabling for all connections.

Apart from making the cabling work crappy. I would rather go and buy house wire and conduits and work that way. In fact I have 40m or so of red, black and yello/green left over from a time when my house was rewired.

This idea isn't really a major issue to me, until it comes to the switches for the lights.

Basically 3 wires (of the flat t&e) used to take hot down once and up twice. Meaning black and earth are now actually being used as hot.

This causes some alarm bells to me since these things are standardised so the next guy knows whats happening without tracing all the cables.

It most likely will never happen, becuase most people check first, but if you accidentally thought earth was earth on that cable and strapped it into a bigger earth, showerhead maybe, we would probably see a repeat of Builder electrocutes customer for the third time. Only this time it is a friend "donating" his trade test services to get a CoC, not a builder cutting corners.

Is this acceptable practise?

Many thanks