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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

>I'm disappointed at the anti-DIY sentiments here, it's this safety obsessed mentality that got us to where kids can't walk outside by themselves any longer.

Just no? That analogy is EXTREMELY strained. From his own link: A word about safety. I’m not an electrician. I’m not allowed to make alterations to my consumer unit.

I let my kids play outside all the time solo and with friends without supervision. On the flip side, I don't do things like design my own L2 charger because it violates several codes, would nullify my homeowners insurance, and could quite literally land me in prison should I mess it up and cause a licensed electrician to die because I did something dumb or cause my car to start on fire killing my family.

Do I do my own wiring? Absolutely.

Would I mess around with attaching something at 240v that I made from scratch that could burn my house down and kill my family if I do it wrong? Nope, I'm good.

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> I’m not an electrician. I’m not allowed to make alterations to my consumer unit.

It's funny how we reach a society where you need government as a babysitter and tell what you can do and whatnot.

> Would I mess around with attaching something at 240v that I made from scratch that could burn my house down and kill my family

It's also funny how those people readily plug in any consumer device they buy on amazon, which is assembled in china/india without any thought about safety.

> It's funny how we reach a society where you need government as a babysitter and tell what you can do and whatnot.

every code regulation is written is blood. the inconvenience is designed to prevent people burning their house down or worse.

> every code regulation is written is blood

Every code regulation is written because some forces lobbied it. It’s nice to think those forces care about you and me, but it’s also incredibly naive.

"... would nullify my homeowners insurance ..."

It almost certainly wouldn't.

Generally speaking, in the United States, homeowners insurance "covers stupid".

DIY electrical wiring, and the like, would be covered unless something was intentionally or maliciously negligent.

If you miswire a three-way lightswitch (in good faith) and (somehow) burn your house down, that is generally covered.

I'm not sure that's true in the UK. The law changed a few years ago limiting the kind of changes you can make to your home wiring, and you have to have a certificate for new circuit installations or significant modifications. I would not want to be the test case for finding out if this did invalidate your home insurance.

> would nullify my homeowners insurance

What is up with this common refrain? One of the main functions of insurance is to indemnify you against your own negligence. Let's say you turn a small stovetop fire into a house fire by trying to put it out with water - the insurance company doesn't just get to stiff you because you were responsible for causing the problem. Are there actually prevalent and enforceable weasel clauses about DIY work in some areas, or is this a scare story popularized by oversocialized redditors fantasizing about what might happen, or what?

Homeowner's insurance assumes you're doing your due diligence to not do things that unnecessarily destroy your home. Negligence is specifically not covered when it's something that you should have reasonably been able to prevent. There's a difference between a panic-induced response that makes an accidental fire worse and you making the explicit decision to install something unsafe.

I see the distinction you're making with my specific example, but I'm aware of no such distinction for the policies I've had. Are you referencing any concrete laws or contractual terms?

Also then, a different example: You plug in a non-NRTL-tested appliance from Amazon, and it burns down your house. Clearly outside the bounds of what is prudent, but also something many people commonly do. You're telling me that insurance is set up to stiff all of them, and yet we're not seeing endless news articles about that happening?

Ianal but the law often seems to work on the basis of terms like reasonable or expected. Buying junk electronics from Amazon is so common and risks so little publicised that it doesn’t seem reasonable to exclude them. Building a diy power supply is very uncommon and almost certainly requires knowledge to do so that would also tell you it’s a dumb idea.

As an aside- do cheap electronics actually burn a lot of houses down, or is that scare mongering? I half remember reading that it was large white goods like dishwashers and washing machines that actually started most fires, and they are not typically bought on Amazon or only on price.

If you can find some laws or contractual terms where some homeowners insurance is disclaiming homeowners doing things that are not "reasonable", I'm all ears. I'd love to find out where this meme started, or a list of jurisdictions where this can actually happen. I just think this tendency to assert that DIY causes all these scary things, especially on the pan-jurisdiction Web, is terribly harmful FUD. It appears to be from the same vein as that "voiding your warranty" nonsense (which has thankfully started to go away).

That refrain is common enough that I even ended up reading my homeowners policy, and I didn't find anything in there that excluded unpermitted work, even if I did the work myself, even if I failed to follow code.

And if you think about it, such an exclusion would be crazy. The average homeowner is in no position to judge whether the work someone they hired does exceeds the scope of their license, or whether all the details of the work that need a permit get one, or whether work any work that doesn't get inspected is in fact done to code. Furthermore, the average homeowner isn't the original owner of their house, and is in no position to know what tomfoolery the prior owner might have done.

For those of you out there that are certain that DIY electrical work voids your homeowners insurance, can you prove any evidence to support your claim? A local news story about a guy whose homeowners insurance denied him because he DIY'ed something in good faith? A FAQ page from an insurer that says that DIY'ing something voids the insurance? Anything other than a vague reference to there being a lot of words in your policy and it gets interpreted through the lens of an enormous body of caselaw and the insurance company can afford more lawyers than you?

Insurance regularly pays out when people do stupid stuff and cause a loss to their own insured property, as long as they weren't trying to do damage. Doing stupid stuff that happens to involve electricity doesn't seem any different to me. And frankly, building your own L2 charger after much research and thinking about the safety aspects seems like a far cry from a "here hold my beer" moment.

I don't live in the US (in New Zealand), but this made me check my policies. I'm no longer a home owner but I checked my policy from a couple of years ago, and I checked the contents insurance I currently have (which has indemnity for the rented property as well).

An intentional or reckless act wouldn't be insured if it directly causes a loss, but anything else is. There's no exclusion for doing things that are illegal other than illegal substance manufacturing, and I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything because the whole policy is 12 pages, including the cover and table of contents.

Electricity regulations wise, it's legal for me to do anything that plugs in to a socket. If I owned and occupied the property it's legal to do anything that doesn't require moving or adding a fixed cable to the consumer unit. Adding new fixed cable runs required a licensed electrician to sign them off before energising. It's illegal to do DIY electrical work on a property if it's let to anyone other than family, unless it's certified by a licensed electrician.

There is more than the policy, there is also the law and court caselaw (at least in common law countries). The policy is where they detail things not covered by the others in some way. So you need to check with a lawyer.

>What is up with this common refrain?

It's reality? Installing an L2 charger requires a permit. You don't technically have to get one, there's no county police that goes door to door checking for improper/horrible EV charging installations. However, if your house burns down, and they see you decided to jury rig your own charger from piece parts, I can guarantee you with 100% confidence they're going to tell you to pound sand when you make an insurance claim.

On the off chance your home-made charger didn't start the fire, you can spend a decade fighting them in court. But you'll probably lose.

How's that? Does plugging in a fridge require a permit? As long as the EVSE is plugged into an outlet like any other appliance, it's just an appliance. Your jurisdiction may require a permit for installing the outlet in the first place, but I've never heard of one where plugging an appliance into the outlet does.

Anyway, how many DIY EVSEs start fires? It's a glorified extension cord, not exactly rocket science, and as long as the builder applies a modicum of sense to choosing the components and wire gauges inside, and torques the connectors and stuff, there's really not much going on in there that should produce heat in the first place.

Also, this isn't a charger. It's an EVSE, there's no power electronics inside. There's a contactor, that's it, no silicon in the power path. It's really hard to screw it up.

Perhaps I'm just accustomed to the Hackaday comment section, but HN commenters are weirdly terrified of anything involving AC. It's just electricity. Not even very much of it, like, normal household levels of 240v AC. My clothes dryer uses more power, and it pulls it over wiring installed in the 1970's. Heck, when I moved, I even replaced the cord on my own dryer with one that matches the outlet in this house, an action explicitly allowed and encouraged by the access plate on the back of the appliance. The bare cords are sold at Home Depot and they come with a little slip of paper explaining how any homeowner can install them.

It's fine. It's just wire. Pick one that's thick enough, torque the screws, it's fine.

>>I’m not an electrician. I’m not allowed to make alterations to my consumer unit.

So two funny things about this in UK law - the law doesn't say who is allowed to work on your consumer unit, you can do it by yourself if you wish. What the law does specify is that the work has to be certified by a "competent person" but then doesn't actually narrow down what a "competent person" means. Local regulations might, but the UK law on this does not.

But they can provide a list of them! https://www.competentperson.co.uk/

Of course - but again, the law doesn't specify that a "competent person" has to be on that list, or any list.

There was a huge debate about this couple years ago, when someone asked "can a foreign electrician certify a UK electrical installation as safe", and after very long debate the outcome was that yes, they can, because the British regulations never actually specify what they mean by "competent" and a certified electrician(even if foreign) is definitely "competent" even if not registered with any UK based authority.

You’re responding to a statement you straw-manned. The comment you’re responding implies a slippery slope, not an equivalence between DIY safety and letting kids be outside.

What? Are you op's alt-account, or did you not bother to read his response? I straw-manned nothing. He compared making your own home-charger to letting your kids play outside, not me. I simply pointed out that comparing the two was ridiculous. The fact you'd accuse me of straw-manning when I was doing literally the opposite is somewhere between hilarious and offensive.

FWIW I read it as a straw man too, and the original as a slippery slope argument rather than an equivalence. Communicating in short bits of text is hard.

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