ᐅ The electrician connected the live wire to the blue conductor.

Hello everyone,

We will probably be able to move into our house in the next few days and wanted to connect and test the roller shutter motors yesterday.
During this, we noticed that the electrician connected the live wire to the blue cable. My question is now (since I don’t have much knowledge about electrical work) whether this is compliant with VDE standards at all.
We have three cables everywhere: blue (live), brown (neutral), green-yellow (protective earth).
As far as I know, brown is always the live wire?!
The question is also, when you operate the ceiling light via the switch, whether the neutral wire is switched, and if there is still “power” on it even if the light is off. That wouldn’t really be safe...

I will measure again this evening to check if the live wire is switched at the ceiling light points and how the sockets are wired.
I find it hard to believe that the electrician “accidentally” connected the blue cable to live on the roller shutter motors...

Hello,
normally the live wire is gray, black, or brown. Neutral is blue, and the protective earth is green-yellow.
What puzzles me a bit is that there are only 3 conductors going to the roller shutter. Usually, there are 4: neutral, PE (protective earth), live up, and live down. If they used the wrong cable (3-core) for the roller shutter, they might be using the blue as live and the PE as neutral. This is definitely not allowed.

The roller shutter has five wires: blue, brown, green-yellow (connected only if operated by radio control), and additionally gray and black (for up and down control via a switch).
If operated only by radio control, connecting the three wires is sufficient.
If a switch is also to be used, the gray and black wires are connected to the switch, and the live wire is additionally routed to the switch.
We have tested all of this, and it works.

The only issue is that the blue wire coming from the house wiring is the live wire...
In my opinion, this is not compliant with regulations.

Hi,

Baumhaus.Bau schrieb:
The only thing that doesn't fit is that the blue cable coming from the house wiring is the live conductor...

Other experts might want to comment on whether this is allowed, but I’d bet a case of beer that it’s not okay.


It definitely goes against standard electrical practices and puts anyone working on the wiring without knowing about this miswiring at considerable risk.


I would absolutely not accept that!


Looking further, if the electrician has already cut corners on something like this, what else might be wrong? Have you checked if the circuit breakers in the distribution board are actually connected or just decorative? (Not a joke, this really happened in a student dorm I once lived in!)


I would have the entire electrical system thoroughly and carefully inspected.


Best regards,


Andreas

Baumhaus.Bau schrieb:

We have three wires everywhere: Blue (live), Brown (neutral), Green-yellow (ground).
.

Blue can be anything except ground.
Green-yellow must be ground.
Brown/black/gray, etc., only live conductor.

However, the neutral conductor must always be blue, so the way you described it would not be correct unless you measured it incorrectly.

A quite important question: How did you measure that the "phase" is on the blue wire?
If the blue wire was actually used as the live conductor, I wouldn’t speculate for long but would ask the electrician directly. Maybe it was really just a mistake (and only at this point), or perhaps an apprentice in their first year made an error.
Asking costs nothing and might solve the problem quite quickly.