Do I RCD protect the oven and hob or not?

When doing portable appliance testing and checking for IP2X (fingers can't access live parts), lampholders is the one exception allowed there. (The usual causes for failures on this test are old electric fires with the grill guard spacing large enough to poke a finger through.)

Can these fires be re-labelled as an incandescent light?

One, admittedly tenuous, advantage to putting a cooker on an RCD, is that it's more likely a "soft" failure when there is a fault - might be better for those of a nervous disposition than a "bang" from a failed element ;) :)

Lee

So you end up with an unusable oven which trips everything else. If it wasn't on an RCD, it would continue working fine for years, as the element will drive off the moisture causing the leak within a few seconds of switching on. You don't generally get bangs from failed elements -- they eventually just go open circuit, possibly with a little arcing, but basically pretty harmlessly.

It was meant tongue in cheek - did you spot the smilies? ;)

Though I have seen some pretty noisy element failures in the past - especially the old "ring" type hobs. I take it modern designs don't fail like that any more then?

Lee

Due to the current regulations, "all downstairs socket outlets must be rcd protected".

Wouldn't that depends on the position of your cooker with location to the nearest window, majority of council properties I've been to have the cooker near a window or the back door, ideal for plugging in the lawnmower!

No, that's not the wording. The wording's closer to 'sockets it can reasonably be foreseen that an outdoor appliance will be plugged in to'. It's then a common interpretation to take that to mean 'all downstairs sockets' - AFAIR that's what Whitfield suggests - but it's down to common sense. If there are other kitchen sockets closer to door/window, much more so if there's a handy outdoor socket on the outside wall -

Still, there's common-sense and let-Darwin-rule; and then there's jobbing electricians who need to cover their posteriors lest Wayne and Waynetta stick the where-there's-blame mob onto them, I guess...

I don't know why kettles are plugged into cooker control units. In the days when the cooker unit was the only outlet in the kitchen rated higher than a BC lampholder adapter perhaps. My kettle's plugged in next to the sink as that's where it gets filled for tea and emptied for the odd top-up of boiling water for the washing-up.

The cooker socket at the other end of the kitchen (and nearest the window, so most likely to be used for outdoor appliance apart from the fact that this is an upstairs flat) is used for the fridge.

Owain

Common sense doesn't really come into it, the majority of people will wall into a kitchen and plug the lead into any available socket, ie if the cooker skt is empty they will use it, no matter if there is one by the back door with the toaster in, they would rather run a lead across the room than take out a plug of unused item.

I never use those combined cooker control panel plus socket. This is because I don't put cookers on RCDs for reasons explained elsewhere recently, but I do RCD protect all the kitchen worktop socket outlets (even when this isn't required by the regs).

This isn't the case. Only sockets which might be used to power outdoor appliances need to be RCD protected. If you have a good provision of sockets outdoors anyway, it's unlikely any of the indoor ones are likely to be used for this purpose.

Actually, one place I have used a combined cooker control panel is for the outdoor sockets. The panel is in the garage next to the door with the switched socket handy for running tools just outside the garage, and the large switch is used to isolate all the other sockets which are outdoors in the front and back gardens. I went for one with neon indicators so you can quickly see if the RCD has tripped. The cooker control panel seemed ideal for this task. The whole radial circuit is on a dedicated

If this is really the case, then surelly ALL sockets must be RCD protected in the whole house, as at some point any of them *might* be used for an outside appliance? (For example, say there is a socket behind the fridge, it is not impossible for this to be used for outdoor appliances - yes, it's highly unlikley, but it just might happen!