Hydraulic cable spiking
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- čas přidán 5. 01. 2023
- In this video we are spiking two mystery 300A 95mm2 electrical cables to find out if they are live.
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The works carried out in the video and the opinions shared are my own, and not representative of the associates and companies in the video.
This content is purely for entertainment purposes and is in no way a "how to", tutorial or educational video.
Please consult an electrician when dealing with any electrical installations.
#electricianlife #electrical #electricalengineering - Věda a technologie
This demonstrated a bit more planning and control than the usual method of spiking an unknown cable, involving a digger bucket and an operator in need of a new pair of trousers.
We sold some land for a small development, I noticed the digger driver in large ish (13 ton) machine going very deep and fast in the location of a previous twin pole and transformer location, that was removed and put underground maybe 15 to 20 years earlier....I walked up the field and warned him, he basically blew me off! "Weston power have checked it!" He pointed 👉 further up the field it's up there!!! I went back indoors, 3 minutes later, an almighty bang and flash, I ran back out to see if he was alright, his face was a picture LOL 😆. I couldn't help but say "You found it" 11kv and knocked out power to about 1000 homes for hours.
Some years ago (early 80's) I was working for a large, well known UK company who were carrying out major expansion work on one of their sites. The contractors had unearthed a large "cable" that needed to be dealt with before they could move forward with their groundwork.
Unfortunately we had a senior engineering manager who was a totally incompetent idiot whose first reaction was to send a message to the electrical department to send a couple of sparkys with hacksaws to cut out this piece of redundant junk that does not show up on any drawings.
When we all refused point blank to do this he came back with, "OK we'll spike it, and then there will be an enquiry into why you are all refusing to do what you are paid for".
So the following day we all turned up to watch this cable being spiked, because after all it is not something that you see every day and we were all horrified to see this tw*t turn up with our newest apprentice who was wearing a visor, rubber apron, heavy rubber gloves and carrying a sharpened bastard file and a lump hammer.
Despite all our (very vociferous) objections this poor lad was bullied into standing in the trench, file pressed against the cable's casing and lump hammer raised while I was praying that in the worst case scenario, a cable that size must be an oil filled HV cable that will trip on the slightest loss of oil pressure.
The lad's name was Terry and he was absolutely terrified when he closed his eyes and swung the hammer....
We all stared in amazement when instead of a loud bang, a jet of water shot about 60 feet into the air and started rapidly filling the trench with water.
In the aftermath of all this, Yorkshire water were massively unimpressed that no one had asked them if this was their water main and we did get a new senior engineering manager
Do some water mains look like cables then?
@@kss987 Old cables and water mains both had tar on the outside. For the water mains it was meant to prevent rust and electrolytic corrosion on the outside and for cables it was meant to keep the oil in and water out.
@@kss987 Modern ducts and pipes tend to be color coded as do some cables. IIRC it's Black for LV (under 1KV, normally 230V/400V) electric, Red for HV electric, Yellow for gas, Grey for BT, Green for cable TV, Orange for traffic lights and Purple for motorway services. Fiber altnets seem to often use orange or purple too.
Direct buried comms cables and older plastic water pipes are often black though and there is certainly size overlap between the three categories. So they could easilly be mistaken.
Cables that pre-date modern plastic would often have a metal armour coated in fabric and tar. Again this could look pretty similar to a pipe coated in the same way.
@@petermichaelgreen Colors are also country dependent. American buried service/cable/pipe colors are red for electric anything, yellow for gas or liquid fuel, blue for potable water, purple for nonpotable water, green for sewers and drains and orange for comms.
What an insane twat.
Forcing an apprentice to do something insanely dangerous thats also illegal to do (spking a cable with a fucking file for example) gets you fired, contractors/tradesman licence revoked and maybe even sued in a court of law.
The Dead short is how you identify a decommissioned cables as shorting cap ends (copper braid and nails into all cores and neutral earth's) are applied to either side of the disconnect, so if found and opened under live working techniques' it can be identified as a decommissioned cable. It's done on both sides of the disconnection so at any point if opening and cutting it can still be identified, if your leaving it the ground you should re-applied a shorting kit to each cut end so future jointers can also identify it without the need for using a spike (which we only spike HV, use live techniques on all of cables and testing). Ps I work for a DNO as a LV/HV cable jointer.
They’re not dno cables though, they’re swa cables so by rights can’t be opened to test as they’re not designed to be worked on live. I’ve spiked many dno ooc LV’s over the years. I worked on a massive city centre project that involved spiking 100’s if not 1000’s of pilcs that where not on the drawings and needed rid of. The only thing to do was spike every 1 and hope for the best
@dannyc What he said. I would think you would want to leave them shorted out again buried back in the ground. 😁👍
Thanks. I was just wondering about that situation.
Can't believe no one crept up behind the guy pumping and shouted BANG!
Whoever is editing your videos is doing a great job!
This just gets better and better...all the effects looks like a Netflix Series:)). Well done mate 👏
That's funny, I don't get NF vibes, just a smooth quality experience.
Just found your channel only recently, but been following and watching the backlog of videos ever since. Fantastic editing and interesting subjects. Working in process automation and interfacing with sparkies often, your videos are very educational to me. Sometimes I toy with the idea of retraining myself to become a true sparky, but then the bits, bytes and distillation columns keep calling me.. Sometimes I feel torn between these two worlds, lol.
Thanks for the high quality content!
Many years ago we did an inventory of all the supply lines on a major site (dozens of buildings) on a chemical development site. All went went well upon one out going group, measuring around a 90 amps three face live…. All efforts (tracing, following etc) to locate the end of that supply failed, so out of a safety point of view the decision was made to switch off the one supply and find out where it was going. A plan was made about a hundred people in on a Saturday morning and….. damn … a hidden supply to a major computer server room. In the room unbelievable a wall was setup in front of the distribution board! What idiot did this .. we never found out.
Similar issue on MBNL EE Telcom. Central London a gold telecom site with twenty dependant telecom sites , blue chip client's on the EE network. Telecoms equipment down equating to £300K loss of revenue for twelve hours. My mate Darren attended site as a P1 ( priority 1 call out ) spent several hours trying to find origin of EE electrical supply, finally came to conclusion had to be behind brick wall sitting on a concrete floor rising to a concrete ceiling. Permission giving by landlords for a building contractor to demolish the wall. Yep there was the cutout and EE switchgear incoming 4 pole 300ma 100amp RCD tripped. The outcome the landlords came to a financial agreement to settle EE loss of revenue and named responsible to EE customer and the fuming blue chip clients.
Never heard of cable spiking until I've seen this 👍
Absolutely brilliant video, Mikey thoroughly enjoyed that. I worked in a very similar building to that in high Wycombe. I’m sure it was even called by number as well. Your video editing. is absolutely on point. Thanks again mate. Never seen spiking on cables before
Really enjoyed this video, as I do all your videos. I like the commercial/industrial stuff more than residential. Cheers from Florida!
Really enjoyed this Mike. I found it really interesting and have not seen this being done before. Good to see they were actually dead cables. I wonder how spectactular it would have been if there was electricicy in there. I assume a big bang and a meter of cable missing.
We found a 185mm SWA in the same situation. All someone could find was a schematic that said TV and no other information. It must have been a pretty large television that now isn’t working.
I've done quite a lot of cable spiking in the past used a cartridge spiking gun, they made a bang dead or alive :) Those cables might have been for a tower crane during construction posible the cables were left in situ as it may not have been cost effective to recover them
Big up the best electrical youtuber out here! Love the content! Great for building my industrial knowledge
Awesome video mate. I rewatched your intro a few times, something very satisfying about that editing, well done.
MATE, that was class I secretly wanted to see it go bang tho 😂
Your editing skills and work is fantastic man keep it up
Love these kind of videos Mike, as a mainly domestic spark I find this stuff really interesting to see what happens in other parts of the industry. Only really do commercial/agricultural stuff other than domestic I rarely do any industrial stuff and even that is very light industrial. Loving these videos and your insta stuff.
To be honest I wouldn’t deem this industrial.
Great Video, really well put together. Well done mate
great vid, thanks for sharing, i didn't know this procedure!
I've only done this once on HV cables with a cartridge spiking gun. The supervisor passed me the rope to pull the firing pin I was nervous as owt. They'd used a tone generator on the cables first but still weren't fully sure they were dead
A very interesting video. That is the first time that I have seen a hydraulic cable spiker. I was surprised at the slow speed of the spiking. When I received my training on cable spiking, it was with the "Shelvoke" spiker which used a cartridge to fire the spike into the cable. I never had to actually use one on site, however.
Spotted it was Guildford within 2 seconds lol. Thats cool. Great vid.
I have to give it to you. You know how to build suspense. Well done!
What a nerve wrecking documentary. The suspense, the build up, the mystery - will we ever truly know where these cables came from?
Absolutely killing it with your editing. Spot on mate.
Doubt there isnt any other, more safer way to know if the cable is dead or not, but whatever works I guess. Just doesn't look safe. Especially if it ends up being live. Greets from Russia.
Brilliant video, been in this game a long time and never seen the spike 👏👏
The only thing I'd really be concerned on is during the process they become live, after spiking. Highly unlikely I know but someone might flick a breaker somewhere, or if it's outside lighting triggered by a light sensor or other device.
Would have needed to be 50kW of stadium lights if they used such a cable to power it😂
Since they notified everyone in the building and the DNO, nobody will touch any disconnects until they are finished. Also notice he never touches copper with bare hands.
The filming & editting is next level
In before all the yanks waving volt sticks around - yeah that's dead my death-stick says so 😂
I have only seen this done once before and it was a gun that did the spiking the thing that crossed my mind at the time was if it was live and it blew a fuse knowing where the fuse that blew was, this was at a large hospital site though.
Think I’d have worn ear defenders in that enclosed space haha!
Wouldve been better to use a cartridge spiking gun on them reather than the slow drive hydro. Also a lee vaughan cable id tool wouldve gave an inkling wether the cables were loaded before you went near them (as the noise of a live loaded cable is like a roaring) with a spiking gun. Other ways would’ve been an experienced jointer to split the cable insulation and prove with test lamps as it’s an obvious LV cable rather than HV with the joint arrangement.
Really enjoyed that video!
That intro was siiiiiiiiiiiiiick bro
Found one in a very old house cellar..thoughts..saw it out and weigh it in...but not being stupid,got in a tame spark..live!!!
Unmetered !!! Made safe and useable it was put to use,probably still growing things to this day..long time ago..far away!!!
Pretty wild stuff.
Could of just put a non contact tester to it before the spike.
Thanks for this - I was expecting a rapid movement. Surely if the spike moves slowly there's a chance of fire?
Honestly man yer videos are mint
hacksawing through some heavy cables i was assured were dead on a site we were demolishing, the cables would spark when i ran the hacksaw across. I angrily downed tools and demanded a thorough investigation and some clean underwear..
It turned out the building had been used for mixing explosives used in the quarry next door and the liquid explosive had somehow got onto and impregnated the cable and would cause showers of sparks when the hacksaw rubbed it.
Strangest thing ever.
All my metal tools used on that site turned to rust in a matter of weeks.
Production quality 👌
Always great to see professionals doing their thing, team working together.
Q: What would this kind of HV cabling typically be doing? What kind of equipment is it sat consuming things down these connections?
Its LV not HV
Great video Mike, however after working for a DNO for 20 years I carried this work out multiple times.
Drop me a message and I can help you with how to deal with this problem next time.
Keep up the great work!
👍
Could it be possible that they where on change over from mains to a generator supply ?
This is brilliant
Another amazing video
What a load of fairys, hack saw, marigolds and a pair of sun glasses is all you need.😮
Damn that intro 🔥
I would think you could use a clamp ammeter to see if there is current in the cable. Granted, it could be live and not passing current. If the cable has AC on it you can detect that using an RF probe like a telecom tone generator and probe. I like the fact that the spike is definitely going to make the cable safe by shunting it to ground. Great content.
You can not detect current by clamping on all phases, the currect returning cancels itself out in the meter.
That's why you would be electrocuted,wouldn't work,3ph + n cable,armoured as well. Listen at college.
Good luck detecting anything meaningful on a SWA cable without dismantling the cable first. You might detect some small leakage currents but leakage currents can flow in the armour even if the cable is dead so that still doesn't tell you much.
The alternative to spiking the cable would presumably be to dismantle it using live working techniques but SWA is not designed to be friendly to live-working.
Awesome video. Is this Craig's job by any chance? Good job guys.
@residualcurrent love the editing on the video as well mate. Top job.
Genuine question
Obviously you can't safe isolate/lock of the breaker as you don't know what one it is so when you have cut through the cable and begin working with them what prevention is in place to stop someone turning on that breaker ? I know it's extremely unlikely
That's a very good question, I love the video by the way. I'd be concerned over an automatic Changeover Switch.
Iv had that happen to me once on a testing job. Where the cable was dead and automatically re-energised during testing. The tester came up with 440v and Litterally me and 2 of the cable fitters lads left immediately. We ended up calling UKPN to isolate the 11kv to sub stations in the area. Litterally the cable had just been stripped back too so ever since then we don't cut ones we don't identify. This was over 4 years ago in Earls Court, working for mitre as a subby. It turned out the supply we thought was redundant in the basement, was fed by another substation not controlled by UKPN but London Underground. It wasn't till UKPN turned off 3 surrounding substations we found out where it went. It turns out it was jointed to automatically operated feeders for bank capacitors. Obviously before the building was purchased that piece of land belonged to London Underground so the cable wasn't even on the plans.
Love this content keep up the good work. 👍
The jointers making off the ends would treat the cable as live and terminate it using live working techniques.
Kinda terrifying that somehow they're can be power lines that nobody has any record of what they're for.
so if it’s live what do you do? Is the assumption that it would blow breaker - unless you found that blown breaker I’m not sure I would want to make them safe without knowing where the end is
How does it help to test them? Maybe they are temporarily switched off!
Can you do a tour on your van and a tool tour?
Just wondering. I know you had to spike this but Would a cable finder not have proven that the cable was live?
Cables go to a secret gov facility. Lol.
Best CZcams channel for electrcians! Fact.
The thing is, did you get the cuttings for scrap!???
Why can't you use a non contact voltage tester to check the wire?
Gives whole new meaning to "destructivr testing" seen the aftermath of one of those big fat cables get hit with a dozer bucket... whole lotta nope 😲😲😲😲😲
So sometimes it´s not a spike in the Voltage, it´s a spike in the cabel ;-)
Why wouldn't you use a hall effect on a fiberglass pole to see if it's hot?
I remember having to cut and joint 2 X 4 core 300mm cables in a trench,proved both were dead and locked off myself but still had a puckered ring piece when I started cutting into first one.
Hello I'm electrician from Finland 🇫🇮
It's very interesting watch your videos and how installations are done in UK
Keep up the good work 😎☀️
You should put something between the two cables if the first one is love and damages the second one you don't want to have to work on a damaged live that you have no idea where it goes.
interesting to see how this works.... i would have hacked into the cable and tested with a registered tester.... RAMS are weird to me, 95mm is the largest i deal with
Don't your hydraulic hose have steel braiding?
Stupid question and I'm a bit of a novice, but when you tested the ends would it have shown 999 if the other end of the cable just a had a cap on the end and no nails in it?
Generally when you apply a cap, you tie all phase together and you earth down one end. Look up 3m cscak, if your wondering.
very cool but its a shame, i was waiting for the bang😞
Interesting stuff good video
@@residualelectrical your doing some nice stuff bro and stuff I've not experienced or seen.
liked the cable spike was expecting a big shower of sparks thou 😋😋😋🤓🧨👨🔧
Iam enjoy watching yours vidio frend
Would’ve thought it would have been safer to strip back the armour and simply used a volt stick 🤷♂️
Must have been temporary supplies that were cut off and left there.
I think you found a decommissioned cable and split it in half, alwsys found the spike test mad myself in a world of calculated math it seems very hit and miss literally.
Hi mate, I’m qualified but mainly do domestic, what’s the best way to get into more commercial and industrial?
I would say subbying to companies/sites that do commercial/industrial
question:
contactless circuit tester , wouldnt that work?
too much volts?
1) the cable armour would prevent it working
2) those things indicate live. They don't prove dead. How lucky would you feel?
I've used a magnetic field meter with a separate search coil to determine if an swa cables is under load. This works as in close proximity, the fields don't cancel. It was very useful when I had 5 cables down a hole & I needed to cut one of them. As I was able to switch load on & off to all cables, I could check both ways to be absolutely sure. However, it doesn't prove dead which is harder as the earthed armour blocks electric fields.
So at firstufyl you strip cable and put gland on it then You check are that 3 phase cable dead?
How You still alive?
Guess you missed the whole spiking bit... A metal spike going through the cable is going to rapidly show if it's live by going bang when it shorts out.
Wouldn't you be able to check with a simple amp clamp?
No, 3 ph & n cable not a single and it's got steel armour around it
Could a clamp meter not have been used instead?
No because the fields from the different phases balance each other out and give you a zero reading - unless there's leakage in the system.
@@farmersteve129 thanks for explaining 😊
You seem to assume that there is multiple cores in the cables?
@@residualelectrical exactly " basec 4x95mm2. Xlpe swa/ "etc,etc
Did you get the tatt money?
no... not live.. although i would Not have trusted that spike device thing.. it looks like it could easily miss a hot making u assume the cables dead when in actuality its still got a few kv rollin thru it
Why not just use a non contact volt meter ? just a thought
Steel armour on the cable ,non contact d.i.y testers don't work through s.w.a cables
Why not strip the cable back and just use some test lamps?
why dont you just use a meter ?
boring is good in these cases.
Stupid question, couldn’t you of just broken open the torpedoes and put a new enclosure round them once investigated?
the torpedoes are resin filled which goes rock hard so if the cables were live, smashing it with a hammer wouldn't be a good idea.
Should have just use a pen tester
To be honest, I can't believe anyone still uses a hydraulic spiking gun. Outlawed by the DNO I worked for decades ago. Shouldn't the gun body be earthed? Y'know, just in case?
@@residualelectrical we’ll have to agree to differ on the safety of hydraulic spiking guns. If it was earthed it wasn’t clear from the video. Spiking live LV cables is more likely to result in the “hand grenade” result than MV cables. Prospective fault currents can be much higher and clearance times significantly slower than MV. Not to my credit but I have spiked one live 11kV cable in my career - didn’t make any flash or bang (other than the silver gun cartridge, which is really only a pop). I’ve see LV cables take off like a flamethrower!
Is this a joke??
Why didn't you use live working techniques for a strip and test ? It's certainly an LV cable with the joints. Spiking is a dangerous game especially when your in a basement, smoke, fumes and fire will fill that space in seconds. Spiking doesn't always mean it's dead either.
@residualcurrent
The cable looks like a fairly standard 4 core swa ? Fairly common formlive working, there is companies out there that have live working techniques outside of DNO's.
LV cables will happily sit there burning for a good while, to that without knowing the source of the cable, you're lucky it wasnt live. The clip of the HV cable is actually a short amount of time as HV's will have better protection and are designed to isolate quickly under fault conditions.
Spiking a cable would be 1 step to identifying a correct cable, not to prove dead or isolated in any way.
Just be careful playing with this stuff, it will only bite you once. 👍
@residualcurrent apologies I didn't mean to sound condescending, seeing the side of this when things go wrong I'm quite "passionate" about things being safe. What was the DNO response to this, did they make any attempt to trace them ?
Cables outside of DNO usually have better protection so probably wouldn't burn to the extent of Network cables.
Like I said, I apologise sounding condescending, I love your work, love the videos and specially love the use of tools you show.
lol there arent even any "t's" in the word "letter" lol its just "leh-uuh" :p n the word "through" has become "frooou" n "center" is "cen-aaah" language is So weird, how can 2 ppl speak the same one but one group speaks its waaay different, almost sounding like a completely different language sometimes
Cant you just use a volt stick.....
@@residualelectrical The most reasonable response 🤣
Oh dear…. 😂
Wouldn't a C.A.T give you a reasonable idea if it's live?
No,it's not Mrs Jones extension,it's an armoured cable,waving a volt stick about is how you kill people.
How come you couldn't just leave them mate?
4:03 you really have used the sh*ttiest spike kit there is, didn‘t ya? Did you even ever done this before?
You really should have used the, much safer, system from Fameca
Bollocks,kit is fine
You got problems with your method here that can kill a fellow.
*Ground could be non-conductive enough that a puddle would electrocute you even from a distance.
*Both ends of the wire were not secured when cut
*The cable could be intermittently powering the grid or other system, look off, and then go hot
*Electricity could flash heat metal and shoot off burning ballistic fragments
*When you measured continuity you sent a signal through a gigantic cable with your dinky meter thing that might not have enough power to pump a signal down the line, further you called it a "short" which in continuity testing would mean you received a signal(I believe you meant you received no signal.).
SAFETY RATING: F- Shake Hands With Danger czcams.com/video/v26fTGBEi9E/video.html
@@residualelectrical It's cool I'm an electronics engineer your biggest achievement in life was qualifying for a Class B commercial license, what ever.