Bad Electrical Practice

I'll be the first to admit that our office building is a dump. Not necessarily because of the equipment and the people in it, but the actual structure of the building. We purchased the building from a local electric company when they built they're new office.

So you'd think that everything would be electrically sound.

This building has been plagued by piss-poor electrical wiring for years. Several undocumented reports of exposed wiring up in the ceiling and burnt up fuse boxes (yes, we still have a fuse box in one part of the building).

Adding to the mess, the electric company still rents one small closet from us, so they can continue to operate a large microwave antenna. I've never felt very happy about this arrangement. The antenna techs can access the closet at any time. This same closet houses our network and phone equipment, and more than once I've had to fuss at their techs that were "just looking for an outside line," which was causing our internet and phones to shut off.

But recently, they've been sending techs over regularly, installing more equipment. I'm not a radio or a microwave expert, but I like to glance over the new equipment that they bring in. The last time I checked, I found this:














What you are looking at is a bank of four lead-acid batteries connected in series to act as a battery back up in the event of power failure. This is a perfectly legitimate method for creating this kind of backup, but there are a couple of problems. First, notice the pile of black and blue terminal caps lying on the floor. If anything metallic managed to bridge a positive and negative terminal, with that power you'd have an instant arc welder. If anything human bridged those terminals, you might have a dead human.

My second complaint is the fact that those batteries are not in a battery box. Lead-acid batteries can be very dangerous, because they contain acid (go figure)! If something caused one or more of the batteries to rupture (over charging, faulty batteries, etc), that acid can cause all sorts of problems, like starting a fire, rupturing further batteries, death, etc. They make special enclosures for battery setups just like this. Those enclosures hold the batteries and are rated to contain any leak or rupture. Unfortunately, I don't see one of these enclosures in that picture.

If our office building burns down, this'll be what caused it. Meanwhile, we're all getting dosed with microwaves. Mmm...I smell something tasty...