Isolation station

This activity allows everyone to understand the importance of isolating circuits within a consumer unit (home fuse board) before carrying out some work. Alongside this they will discover different safety equipment and hazard symbols to keep them safe.

During this, everyone will have the opportunity to ‘isolate’ an area in your meeting place by standing on the circuit, this allows everyone else the chance to enter a location safely and search for a hazard symbol or piece safety equipment and bring it out to explain to everyone later.

This will involve everyone looking at electrical installations in the meeting place. Make sure that only qualified or competent persons (as defined by the Health & Safety Executive) touch or go near electrical installations with permission from the building owner.

Before you begin

• Choose four locations in the meeting place to isolate. This could be your kitchen, bathroom, main hall, store cupboard or hallway.
• Print out pictures of a variety of hazard symbols and safety equipment that can be found around a workplace, one per page and cut them each into 10-piece jigsaw puzzles.

Example pictures can be found on the 'Safety signs and equipment, and example consumer units' sheet. There will need to be enough for each team to find one in every location. For example if there are four teams and four locations there should be 16 jigsaws to complete.

• Choose a colour for each team, and mark all their jigsaw pieces with that colour before placing them in piles on a table.
• Print out four A4 copies of separate electrical circuits from a consumer unit, one for each location you are using, name them and place them in the middle of the hall.

An example of these can be found on the final page of the 'Safety signs and equipment, and example consumer units' sheet.

• Take two pieces of each jigsaw and hide them in your locations and make sure that each location has all four colours within it.
• Write the locations of the consumer unit circuits on each of the four printouts and place them in the middle of the meeting space.

Isolation time

1. Gather everyone together and, if it’s safe and practical to do so, show them the consumer unit in the meeting space. Point out the different parts and how they link together, and explain which switches activate/disable what elements. If it’s not possible, show them a picture.
2. Split everyone into four teams and have them stand in different corners of the room and give each team a colour.
3. Teams should proceed to the puzzle locations one at a time and should work through them. At each location, one person from each team needs to stay in the meeting space and stand on the circuit that serves that location. This ‘isolates’ the circuit, so that it’s safe for the team to ‘work’ in that area. The rest of the team should search the location for the two jigsaw pieces they need to complete their puzzle, take the remaining eight stacked pieces and return to their corner of the meeting space.

Teams can only fit puzzle pieces with their team colour on them to their jigsaws. The team member isolating the circuit needs to stay where they are until the rest of their team is back in their corner, then they may return to their corner to help collect the next puzzle.

4. Each team should go to each location in this way, with one, different team member isolating the circuit for that location each time. Make sure that only one team visits each location at any one time. Each puzzle should be collected (check that everyone has all 10 pieces for each one) and returned to the relevant corner of the meeting space.
5. Once everyone’s got all their puzzle pieces, have the groups complete the jigsaw puzzles.
6. When all the puzzles are complete, give each team 10 minutes to do some internet research about the symbols and equipment in their jigsaws. Everyone should then come together in the centre of the meeting space and feedback what they’ve learned.