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Consumer unit regulations change

I keep forgetting you come from a country with cheap and nasty plugs etc.

There is no difference in reliability between a decent well fitted 13 plug and a moulded on type.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)
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I'd say if you suffer from nuisance RCD trips you need to investigate why.

Only 'nuisance' trips I get is when some bulbs fail and trip the appropriate MCB - which didn't happen in fuse days.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

It's not a problem I have, but I've heard of it.

Use type C MCBs?

Reply to
Adam Funk

I've seen many many leads with moulded on plugs where a conductor has failed close to the plug, due to flexing.

You simply have no experience of failure modes. Just bullshit about such things.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Well yes. Things with water heaters - like immersions and washing machines - are quite a common device to go 'leaky'. However, if they are leaky, it's a fault even if still working.

Not really worth it given the number of times it happens.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Nope. It was to save copper. I believe it was also used in older buildings with 30A radials. By connecting the ends of two 30A radials to form a ring extra sockets could be installed easily and cheaply. But I imagine that's largely been forgotten. (I remember even in those days the old 15A plug top had a fuse built into the live pin.)

Then you'd need more copper in the leads - sufficient to carry a current protected by the circuit fuse in the CU. The plug top fuse protects the leads and the ring final circuit in the case of faults in the appliance or leads. (The leads may be considered part of the appliance. So just unplug and fix or replace. The ring and anything else connected to it isn't affected.)

Most electrical things work fine most of the time anywhere.

I suggest you read up a bit more about the ring final circuit. Whether it's better or worse than other ways it came about for very good reasons. Ones that possibly didn't matter in other countries.

Edgar

Reply to
Edgar Iredale

It was a recognition that people were wanting more sockets, and a cable back to the CU and a separate fuse for each socket was not scalable (copper consumption would have been enormous), and such a design was not needed because there was no way they would want to run all the sockets at max current draw at the same time.

It was with 15A radials. You picked two of your 15A sockets, and you used them as the first and last socket on your ring circuit. You could remove the other 15A cables back to the CU and use them to form the ring between all your other 15A sockets. You could then convert them all to 13A sockets and add as many extra 13A sockets on the cable as you needed. In some cases, you could do this without needing any new cable at all. This would leave you with the ring circuit having a separate

15A fuse at each end. I don't know if this was initially allowed, but it did occasionally happen. It's not allowed today - you would have to convert to a single 30A or 32A fuse or breaker.

With the vast increase in the number of sockets in households, ring circuits make even more sense now than they did back then, because they scale very well in this respect.

If an appliance needs a fuse for safe operation, that must be in the appliance. An appliance is never allowed to assume it has a fused 13A plug - at no time has the 13A socket been the only socket allowed in the UK (or Common Market, since we joined that).

+1

It's the most recently designed system in use in the world. It was designed to avoid the problems older wiring schemes have.

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

so did some 13A plugs. there was more than one contender for the fused plug. The MK version won,

Reply to
charles

Just shows how little you know.

Your needle appears to have stuck again.

No need to Google - your various witterings on here are quite enough to prove things beyond doubt.

If you really want to do a comparison between moulded and replaceable plug tops, you'd look at where they are heavily used. Like perhaps a commercial vacuum cleaner. But even them you'd still be guessing since you don't know UK 13 amps types.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

15 amps sockets had 15 amp radials. Cable was 7/029 - which was the same as used for rings, before metric. So if the cable was good, they could be used as the start and finish parts of a ring.

I've never seen a 15 amp plug with a built in fuse. The type with the fuse as a pin were D&S 13 amps types - an alternative to the now universal 13 amps types of now. And luckily fairly short lived as it had a number of design flaws.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

There's been a thread running on a BBC forum about those 13 amp D&S gauge plugs. Amazing number got shocks from a fuse which got left in the socket when the plug was removed.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Selfridges, before it went very 'upmarket', used to sell spare fuses for the, so I can only assume some of the "mansion blocks" nearby had been wired to use them.

Reply to
charles

Yes - I've heard that - but I think it was 20A radials.

Reply to
Tim Watts

Correcting myself - 15A radials, but the cable happened to be sufficient (in most cases) for 20A usage.

Reply to
Tim Watts

Yes Andrew you are correct. Not 30A radials they were 15A. That's probably why I think of those fused pin plugs as 15A. Haven't seen one since about

1960. The ones I did see were on radials. 8>
Reply to
Edgar Iredale

Because they were on 15A radials I thought of them as 15A but you're correct.

Edgar

Reply to
Edgar Iredale

Could be - although it was mainly council estates which used them. And the BBC for the tech supply. To prevent a Hoover etc being plugged into it.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Odd to use them on 15 amp radial. But then lots of odd things have been done. ;-)

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Those latter were replaced with "Walsall" ones. These looked like ordinary ones but had all the pins rotated by 90°. Also seen on London Undergound stations

Reply to
charles

I think you've mis-remembered D&S plugs and sockets which were fused at 13A not 15A, but as you say the fuse was the live pin. Like Wylex plugs and sockets, they are a bit of a historical oddity rather than mainstream.

15A round pin plugs were not fused in their hayday, but specialist modern ones are.
Reply to
Graham.

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