Next sales opportunity for CU manufacturers?

ISTR hearing/reading some organisations have started to require clamp meter on the earth to check for currents as part of their routine checks on installations. Do you or others know?

Bloody Cassandra! (Not that I doubt you.)

JW was recommending that as part of checks before disconnecting bonding conductors (e.g. for gas meter replacement) one of the "stories" from parliament was that a coat caught fire after the gas meter it was touching had over 30A passing through it, I suppose the insulating washers are relatively new and they don't all have them?

I don't know what such a device would cost, but given about £100 for an AFDD, and seeing how many current transformers and relays are crammed into EVSE that have PEN detection, it wouldn't be a surprise.

Thanks for that. I'd missed that debate - and not just 'cos I'm a resident of the bit being pushed down ;).

And insulating washers absent from meters around here fitted in the

Link below if anyone else is sad enough to want to read Lord Rooker - still a canny bugger from the the way he floated the idea the Grenfell fire was caused by diverted current.

I don't see why. This is a DNO issue.

Recently my house suffered a loss of neutral in a TN-CS environment and I suspect the old steel gas main took some of the neutral current. If I put a kettle on I measured just 140VAC L-N. The DNO sorted the issue out in a day that affected 3 houses.

Maybe to be on the safe side a nice pack of C4 should blow the CU up when there is a major fault? Brian

I think having PEN fault detection along with an SPD in the CU makes some degree of sense... it's one thing to turn off the EV if you detect your earth becomes live because you've lost the neutral, but it would be handy to have it for the whole installation.

It seems like prices on AFDDs are coming down as the volume goes up, so maybe this would do the same for PEN fault detection?

Similarly I don't think type B RCDs are inherently a lot more complicated than a type AC, but they're at a higher price point because they're only used for EV charging. If every RCD was type B the price would come down.

Hmm... a solution to a problem of their own making (nuisance trips by 'new types of loads' solved by a firmware update).

The thing that's gaining popularity in the US is the 'smart panel', which is a patch plaster for the fact their supply infrastructure is insufficient - many people have 100A service (@110V), so the smart panel is set up to load shed devices to avoid having to pay megabucks for the utility to upgrade service (which seems to be $10K territory for some reason).

That's another reason to have firmware in your consumer unit - not so relevant for us, although I could see per-circuit energy monitoring coming in handy. (But I'd rather have a row of current transformers and a bundle of twisted pair coming out instead, to wire to a monitor of my choosing).

Theo