Discuss colour blind in the Electricians Chat - Off Topic Chat area at ElectriciansForums.net

With the new colours. Could you be colour blind and be a sparky now ?

When you say new colours Dingle, do you mean the 2004 change?

If so, I dont think it makes any difference. Colour blind is generally green/red/brown. Luckily old red is live, new brown is live, to someone who is colour blind they look the same, but if you have an old black/red you know which is the red and if you have new blue/brown you know which is the brown. There arn't any red/brown cables luckily.

I'm talking just about domestic though!
 
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I have to look twice on occasion but it's never affected me. I've said this before but I'll say it again.

If its two core and earth, if there's a blue wire, then the other is brown...

If there's a black wire, it's red...

if there's a blue wire and a yellow wire, it's red...

If there's a black wire and a grey wire it's brown...

If its singles, you are screwed....

I found a brown wire the other day that was a really cheap cable and faded colours or washed out looking, it looked blue to be honest.
 
colour blind is an inability to distinguish certain colours now if this means you have issues in electrics then yes its an issue but as colour blindness varies between different people and colours not all will be affected.

This is why green earth was banned as it was hard to tell from red to someone with that particular blindness so they made it stripey.

Its only an issue if your cannot distinguish the colours and nothing more,
 
colour blind is an inability to distinguish certain colours now if this means you have issues in electrics then yes its an issue but as colour blindness varies between different people and colours not all will be affected.

This is why green earth was banned as it was hard to tell from red to someone with that particular blindness so they made it stripey.

Its only an issue if your cannot distinguish the colours and nothing more,

I was not allowed on my course without passing a color blindness test so if you are color blind you would not pass the test so you would not be allowed on the course, just my experiance
 
Yep, yet another once universal test that's probably been dropped completely for entry into the electrical industry. Why is it that everything seems to revolve around simple domestic installations, when there is a big world out there of high end industrial and commercial installations.


So what do these new colour blind electricians do when they are confronted with and old installation, or multi coloured control cable wiring et,c etc, etc?? There is/was a reason behind colour blindness testing, and it still holds today!!

Someone mentioned that some cables have washed out colours, these will normally be XLPE insulated cables, where quite often the colours are near transparent compared with PVC insulated conductors, especially in SWA cables...
 
So your colour blind uk ?

Yes i am, cannot see the difference between blue and purple, red and brown, some green issues with the red and brown etc...

I know what im doing and touching, If i was in doubt I would not touch it, i full accept that in the industrial world you may come across other colours and shades etc, but for me, as I don't go there, then I am ok.
 
Red/ Green colour blindness affects about 8% of men but almost no women. There is also yellow/blue deficiency but it's extremely rare

Obviously this was discriminatory so they changed it to brown, black, grey so everybody equally couldn't tell the difference
 
So didn't you take a colour blindness test at college ? Or has that stopped now . I wonder how many colour blind sparkies there are
And how about dyslexics could you be a sparky if you had that
 

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Yep, yet another once universal test that's probably been dropped completely for entry into the electrical industry. Why is it that everything seems to revolve around simple domestic installations, when there is a big world out there of high end industrial and commercial installations.


So what do these new colour blind electricians do when they are confronted with and old installation, or multi coloured control cable wiring et,c etc, etc?? There is/was a reason behind colour blindness testing, and it still holds today!!

Someone mentioned that some cables have washed out colours, these will normally be XLPE insulated cables, where quite often the colours are near transparent compared with PVC insulated conductors, especially in SWA cables...
i had to do an eye test for jtl.

they wont even let you apply till you bring along the sheet from an optician

didnt have to do one for college when i did 2330 before joining jtl though
 

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