The first edition of the Wiring Regulations
Where wires are put out of sight, as beneath flooring, they should be thoroughly protected from mechanical injury, and their position should be indicated."
Owain
My house was built in 1976 with wylex rewireable fuses in the hall, inset into the party wall.
Above the fuses is a removeable metal cover plate that stops about half an inch above the fuses.
I noticed that above the 30 amp cooker cable was a black 'splat' and an indentation where the metal, about 2 mm thick had been melted away.
Years later I discovered that the new kitchen that the previous owner had fitted, had resulted in the live cable supplying the cooker being drilled right through to fit a new wall cupboard, and then 'repaired' with a bit of choc-block and hidden by the new cupboard.
That must have been a big bang and anything combustible above that 30 amp wylex fuse would/could have been ignited.
Nice!
I OCRed and tidied up a version of that. Put it here:
Yes well did anybody actually do that? My fuse box when we moved in was the one that was here in 1939 and its fuses seemed to be just bits of any old wire wound around a couple of terminals under a lift up cover with one screw securing it shut, but the big lever had to be off before it could be opened for safety of course. When looking at wiring it was all rubber covered most of it had no earth, and seemed at least upstairs to be just laid about all over the place with junction boxes made of bakelite to spur off the sockets. Brian
thought you would have nice old fashioned metal conduit everywhere ?.....
Who needs Amendment 3 and Permitted Zones.
Some of the people were quite well-known at the time. I wonder if any of the authors of the current regulations are quite so illustrious.
MOST of it had no earth, Brian?
What's an earth?
The house I grew up in had a similar prewar fusebox - non of this modern Consumer Unit nonsense - with the interlocked switch but ours had the luxury of four removeable rewireable fuses - just well, considering the barely accessible location of the fusebox at the back of a cupboard.
The fuses, all wired with 5A fusewire, were fitted in both live and netral of the two circuits. One fed the lighting circuit and the other fed the *single* 5A 2-pin socket in the living room.
Having a fuse in the neutral as well as the live used to be the practise for DC circuits, was this an installation that once was a DC supply and still using the original wiring after changeover ?
Pockets of DC mains lasted surprisingly late, Exeter had a small area which wasn?t converted till the early 1970?s. I think Reading had some fairly late as well.
GH
My aunt and uncle's house (built in the 1930s, in an area that was definitely AC then) had live and neutral fuses when they moved in in the
1980s. It caught them out when they were asked to pull the fuse for a circuit, which promptly went dead and then vapourised the cutting edge of the pliers when a cable was cut!SteveW
Those are still in use in some places.
NT
I was also used in AC fusing - probably until the 1950s.
Yes - my parents house bought new in the '30s had fused neutrals too. And was definitely AC as my father said they'd had to buy a new radio too.
I re-wired it in the 70s. And it just occurred that the wiring in this house has now had about the same life. ;-)
Were you?
Sounds very painful...
Banned for new installs in 55 I believe.
NT
By that time one wire of the supply was reliably a neutral and tied to earth at the generator.
In parts of Europe double-pole MCBs are used because their supply is reversable with neither wire reliably a neutral.
Owain
Yes, often fed from overhead lines and neither side tied to earth.
Some of their 2-gang sockets are effectively two single gangs with one rotated 90° clockwise and the other 90° anti-clockwise and then connected with straight bars - meaning that the two sockets in the same faceplate have opposite polarity!
SteveW
Yeah, it's easy to criticise pre-war dp fusing but there was good reason for it.
NT
No idea but the HMV radio that was plugged into that single socket was AC only and dated back to 1940.
Ilford - so quite a large area - was still 200V DC when I was at school in the late 50s (Ilford Council had been generating
600V DC for the trams, so provided homes with DC as well).Fortunately it had been converted to 240V AC by the time I went to live there in the mid 70s!
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