consumer unit
running
What a story! Reminds me of the sewing factory I saw wired in overhead bellwire. How they got a room full of seamstresses to work there I'll never know.
For the above setup to cook, presumably the fuses must have been replaced with heavier wire, as otherwise the fuses would have popped long before any wires fried IIUC.
NT
He got struck by lightning once while on a job too - unlucky guy...
My late granny-in-law, who for many years lived in a granny flat above my m-i-l, had her own electric meters etc, and apparently always had very low electric bills which of course she never exactly complained about. It was only when the whole property was later sold - during which the granny flat was physically separated from the downstairs flat to be sold separately - that a sparks discovered that all the electricity for the upstairs flat, except for the lights, bypassed the meter completely (I gather he put it right, but nobody ever owned up to the supply co!)
David
I believe it used to be fairly common to wire clocks into the wrong side of the CU isolator, so they kept running no matter what. Hopefully there was some kind of fuse in there...
I once came across an electric shower wired in in 6mm2 (ok given distance and power rating etc) wired into the wrong side of the CU isolator, with no additional switch or fusing. The best bit was that there was insufficient space for the bodging installer to get the wires into the terminals alongside the meter tails, so some of the strands had been chopped short so they would go in!
In our last house there was socket wired into the Henley block twixt the Meter and the CU. At least this was obvious.
I think all the fuses were 30 Amps rewireable, if my memory serves me right, and that was for the lighting circuit as well. The mains fuse had also been changed from the original 60 Amps to a 100 Amps, but I think that was done by the owner himself, maybe on advice from the bloke who these sorts of things, because the 60 Amps fuse had already been popped.
As I told the owner, you are getting more heat from the electrical supply itself, than you are from all these heaters you have. :-)
The electricians who wired my apartment building never put in a meter for the communal supply. A neighbour is convinced the stair lights, carpark floodlights, and whatever someone has connected to some 2.5mm that appears out of the communal supply CU and disappears into a flat, is paid for by the council.
The electricians never put an earth in either.
"Floppy Bunny"
hehe
It's nice when somebody takes pride in their work :)
I came across an Edwardian villa that had been turned into 10 bedsits where the owner had put a coin-meter and small consumer unit in each room. The rest of the wiring in each bedsit was run in trunking from the consumer unit.
So far so good.
Rather than running new cables back to the main supply in the cellar, their "electrician" had however connected the new coin-meters to whatever existing cable had been handy.
There must have been a few blown fuses at first, but the skilled tradesman had fixed these by replacing the wire in the original ceramic fuses with a more robust product.
Given that some of the old cables were rubber coated, former lighting circuits, it's surprising that nothing actually caught fire. The situation only came to light when a cold snap resulted in sufficient
3kW heaters being added to blow the board's fuse.My current horror story is at
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