Ye olde wiring reg's

[Frank Erskine]

I liked them - a sort of split pin tightened merely by the ribbed bakelite cover. No screwdriver needed, appart from occasionally to wedge the pins apart.

[NT]

te:

I did too, but they must be in the top 2 for unsafest plug design. The other prime contender has to be the ones where you pulled the pins apart, pushed the cable in totally unstripped, and pushing the pins back together pushed a pair of spikes into the cable. Again no sane connection and effective cordgrip.

NT

[Robin]

Especially as the wires were such a convenient place to hang washing to dry - which were a good way for a lad to learn the benefits of really tightening the terminals in the BC plug :)

Thank you for the nostalgia moment.

[damduck-egg]

I got an electric trainset on my 6th birthday and at that time we were living in a flat that only had a couple of 2 round pin sockets in it . They were probably 5 amp and connected to the lighting circuit. The power supply for the trainset had to be earthed so my father with all the skill he had developed doing National Service maintaining Lincoln Bombers installed another 2 pin socket he found,this was connected to a nearby water pipe and became the Earth and had EARTH painted on it, the flex to the power supply was split with the earth wire getting its own 2 pin plug . The only difference between them was the painted M for mains and E for Earth upon them. The Big C got him shortly after but his job at the time was designing bits of the first generation nuclear power stations which remembering the plugs on the trainset has made me wonder what went on in them sometimes.

G.Harman

[NT]

:)

[Bob Eager]

Sounds like the way my father wired things up all his life. Amazingly, he didn't die of electrocution!

[Robin]

Well nothing apart from commonsense, instruction, supervision or experience (of others or self)?

[John Rumm]

My former neighbours place (built 1956) only had about 5 single sockets in total originally (on kitchen, and lounge, possibly one in the dining room, one each in two of the bedrooms and none in the third). Wired on two radial circuits with separate floating bare earth wires (stranded galvanised steel). Two or three way MEM CU with re-wireable fuses.

[damduck-egg]

Darn useful if you had run out of matches and needed a light, cigarettes could be held directly on the element, for a pipe or the gas stove a spill made from some folded up newspaper could be ignited easily.

G.Harman

[djc]

Sounds just like the house my father bought in 1958. One socket in each room. I still have the extensive correspondence with the builder whereby, for a extra £25 if I remember, a second single socket was added to the front parlour.

[Terry Casey]

I can't work out for certain if this is the Mk I or the Mk II but I'd plump for the former ...

With the Mk I version, it was possible for the 5A live pin to pop out when being used as a 13A plug. This was no problem a lot of the time but Mr Murphy insisted that it would always happen if a metal clad socket was used ...

I recall the stage of the local Civic Hall which had several such sockets and, as the Fitall plug got increasingly popular with pop groups, it was interesting to see how many more sockets had acquired the characteristic pock mark on its face ...

You could often see obvious traces of vaporised brass from the pin in the pock mark ...

The Mk II version had a slight bump added to the cut out in the black lever part to prevent this happening but it was much too late in the day for many ...

[Nick Odell]

I can't see anything about this plug that sets it out as Mk II but on the other hand I've just double-checked what happens when I move the lever to its extremes when in the 13A setting and none of the pins are able to fall out. It sounds as if some live performances got a bit too live at times. Ah well. One must suffer for ones art.

Nick

[<me9]

[snip]

An excellent plug, no tools needed to fit and a good fit in the socket. Good cord grip too.

I'm sure I've got one upstairs (and something to plug it into).

[<me9]

Well it was hot, jut like the fire in the grate, which no-one in their right mind would touch.

Also in those days, was the concept of an earth free enviromnment where if you touched somethinglive you just became live, with very little current passing through you.

In my first 15 years of life I had many more electric shocks (none of which did me any harm) than in the succeeding 40 years of working with electricity.

Risk assessment has gone mad, it's more risk aversion.

[NT]

The 2 varieties of those old Clixes I know had no cordgrip - or no in any way functional one.

NT

[NT]

Before those there were bowl heaters, much worse safetywise. People even cooked on the things.

NT

[ARWadsworth]

When I bought this house it had one single socket per room. And if I put the immersion on at the same time as the kettle the 15A fuse used to blow.

[ARWadsworth]

Bloody hell. £25 for an extra socket in 1958. I was working in a 1969 house the other day and the house (2 bed bungalow) cost £3000 new and gas CH was a £300 optional extra.

[Jules Richardson]

The upstairs of our house (1948-ish) here in the US is like that, just a single socket in each bedroom (and no earth/ground) - drives the kids nuts what with all their various gadgets that need to be plugged in :-)

It's all radial over here; we've got a big breaker panel feeding most of the house, then an older fusebox (2x big cartridge fuses and 4x screw-in fuses) for the office. There are other similar fuseboxes in the garage, workshop and barn (although the barn no longer has power; previously that was done by an overhead run from the house attic). Wiring is a mixture of new PVC stuff and older cloth-covered rubber (with evidence that the workshop once served as a small house and had knob-and-tube)

cheers

Jules

[John Rumm]

Just the way dennis would wire it ;-)