House rewiring

While I agree Harry's claim was nonsense I think semi-enclosed fuses to BS3036 are a bit slower than that: AIUI four times the rated current should blow in less than 1 second; twice the rated current in about 100. See eg

I have a fully-populated 12-way plugged into a single socket behind the equipment rack. I've never taken the trouble to work out the loading because it's obviously, as you say, nothing like 13 amps.

It's not intended to save lives. It's intended to stop the tenants calling me up in the middle of the night when they blow a fuse.

I agree that an RCD would be good. That's the next change on the list.

Whooooooosh! The whole point is that they do know how to push a switch.

Right. So about a second at four times the rated loading. Not quite half an hour.

This one does,

I've made all our inaccessible sockets accessible by plugging 4-way (individually switched) trailing extension leads in, and hiding under the offending furniture when not in use. Makes hoovering 10x easier :)

Hoovering? Not much chance of that here. :-)

Yes, and the rated lifetime of PVC cable is only 20 years - when run 24/7 a t max load, and at rated ambient temperature. Unsurprisingly, it lasts quit e a lot longer in normal conditions.

I replaced my old fuse board with a new CU/RCD/MCBS a few years ago. The wi ring was nearly 30 years old, the IR was fine, and there were only two thin gs wrong: a broken ring main CPC, due to a loose terminal in a socket (had probably never been done properly), and the undersized CPC - it was 1mm, wh ich happens to be fine with MCBs, but doesn't satisfy the adiabatic eqn wit h rewirables.

That's the wire. I replaced plenty of socket fascias.

If something blows a fuse then you need to find out why! They tend not to trip as easy as mcbs.

twaddle.

TLC have it in their catalogue, although listed as low smoke. Perhaps that's the standard. It's about 45% more tha the grey.

only a problem on spurs, or 2.5mm^2 branches from 4.00mm^2 radials.

The main reason that rewireables are deprecated for tenanted properties is that they allow the unskilled and otherwise less caring of the properties wellbeing alter the rating of the fuses.

Try this as a thought experiment:

Its 11pm, your tenant has just rang to say they turned the hall light on, and now all the lights have gone out. You have a choice of talking a technically clueless person through:

or

I would contest that 1 is far simpler for all involved.

You have to smile at the mastery of understatement that comes with instructions like:

"Do not use the cable. Discontinue use immediately and return the product to the place of purchase for a full refund or replacement. "

Especially if its been chopped into lots of bits, installed and covered over and to make matters worse you can't easily identify which bits are this stuff, or another unaffected brand.

My honest opinion is that Uncle Peter cannot be as incredibly stupid as he makes out. He's bored and lonely. So, he sits at home and trolls on Usenet.

Or you could just ignore it since it has words like "possibly" and "potential".