You'll most likely find the gas light's pipe just randomly chased in

Yes, it was just underneath the plaster of Paris rendering.

As with many Federation houses, there had been additions made over the years and of course they used fibro. The garage was fibro and timber.

(Sold that house 20+ years ago.)

Yikes what a bloody death trap that house in UK was....I was stunned that such a place could exist & the authorities had NOT done something about it but IF they had no idea then how could they??

I am no electrician having only ever held an R ticket in WA which allows holders to do plugs & cords etc but then they dispensed with that rule so all the R ticket holders got "disconnected".

In my previous career in PMG/Telecom/Telstra & working in remote locations when AC plant died there was nobody else to fix it so in we went & sorted out sick gen sets etc & rotary convertors & the like & still lived to tell the tales. So in doing that sort of stuff we got to see all manner of AC generating plant from the inside of the cubicles as well as inside the carcass of alternators up to 35Kva 3 phase beasts having often to swap over a blown rotor in a hurry.
After a nasty cyclone in NW WA the street AC supplies were gone due to poles down all over the place. One exchange building lost a section of roof over the Power/Battery room so water was coming in through the ceiling.
When the street mains failed very early during the "blow" our 15Kva standby fired up & took the load & ran OK until the 200kph winds ripped the doors off the standby hut & the almost horizontal rain was blown/sucked into the alternator slip ring area & a nasty flashover from the N ring to the first phase ring burnt the surface such that the brush had poor contact & the control cubicle saw that as a generator fault so shut the plant down.
We think at the same time the power roof was ripped off & ended up on the perimeter fencing so the place then was running on batteries alone from around 2am in the morning.
We got the "All clear" at around 10am & ventured out but I knew that we had serious issues at that exchange as the Dial Tone was VERY slow as then it was made in a Ringing machine which was driven by the 48V battery supply & generated the 17hz ringing as well as all the tones.
When we got there the battery volts were about 30V instead of 52V, the exchange gear was only JUST switching calls but very haphazard in how it did that. The power/battery room was awash with about 75mm of water trapped by the step into it & naturally NO battery chargers (rectifiers to us) running as NO AC being generated AND a huge burn mark on the grey front panel of the building AC distribution switchboard right alongside the 2 x 200A rectifiers.
We removed the cover to discover that water had obviously gotten into the 3 AC busbars running vertically in the centre of the board & had flashed over at a couple of the spots where the insulating blocks held the bars in place. Rather well charred would be more precise !!
Decided to then look at why the standby had died & it was showing Alternator Fault on the alarm lamp display. Switched the unit to Off Line & ran it up to speed & we saw that one phase had a violently varying 240V there & once the cover came off the slip ring end it was obvious WHY.

No what to do???. Still blowing like hell, a 2000 line exchange almost stuffed & no hope of getting a sparkie locally who knew what he was about with the genset & no way could we have one of our Telepower guys flown up from Perth as the airport was shut & all flights cancelled.

At a previous location I had a radio receiver terminal site that was powered by a pair of the same Dunlite gensets running 24/7 with a daily swap over of duty machines & frequently had to delve into the things to keep the site going.
So I nobbled the field excitation circuit, ran the machine up to speed & nobbled the motor shutdown by removing the applicable relay, checked for ZERO volts at the slip rings and with a couple of files effectively turned that big burn dollop of brass on that slip down just like it was being spun in a lathe.
With the brush now seated OK put the machine back together & ran it up & we then had 240V nice & clean on all 3 phases.

But the mess inside that switchboard stopped us going any further until that had been sorted and we did the only thing we could then was to disconnect the incoming feed cable & the feeds to the 2 x 200A rectifiers & hook all 3 together (the Red/Blue & Yellow phases) by a BIG twist joint on each phase and then taping up our work to keep it safe & dry as rain was still coming in down through that switchboard.
Fired up the standby again & put it online and it grunted a bit at the load when both rectifiers got to their 200A max charge rate & we started getting some battery voltage back up near 50V & we ran like that for almost a week before Telepower got there & took over.

Doing what we did saved out rather expensive battery banks from being knackered & we got the exchange back on line & going although we had a lot of customers who had no houses though !!!