Terminal strips

[Rolyata]

I wanted to make a minor change to the electricity arrangements in my garage.

Fortunately it has it's own distribution box with ELCB and MCBs. It can take 5 units on a DIN rail.

The box is the usual sort of proper housing, with a good IP rating and is clearly the right sort of item for the job, but I see that when it was wired up, there appeared to be no built-in terminal blocks. The common connections for earths and neutrals were all achieved by means of standard nylon barrier strips.

Is this normal practice ?

I'd be quite happy swapping them for the correct item, but upon trawling through the CPC catalogue, I can't see the sort of thing that I've encountered supplied with the distribution boxes I've bought in the past.

You know the sort of thing, half a dozen terminals in a single row, all connected together. You have one for the neutral and another for the earth.

Where can they be obtained on their own ?

[bigcat]

earth blocks, screwfix.com 12386 and 11385. 89p/=A31.65.

NT

[BigWallop]

earth blocks, screwfix.com 12386 and 11385. 89p/£1.65.

NT

Do you get the insulated stand-off's with the neutral bar as well? I don't see them on the site.

[John_ZIZinvalid]

Yes. Very common.

You can make them up with suitable sized chock-block connectors, as in use one side as a common bus bar made up of suitable size insulated wire, while the other side of the chock-block is for connecting to the load.

J

[bigcat]

I dont know where to get those either, unless you use standard choc blocks. Or a jbox even? Why would you need them, given that the CU has all the necessary connections? Unless youre putting wads of cables into each MCB way?

NT

[Stefek Zaba]

The most-pukka thing to use goes under the name of 'commoning block'. RS sell them - to see what I'm babbling on about, pop over to rswww.com and type 388-6469 into the 'search' field - that's their partnum for a 5-way

60A-rated instance. Being RS, they sell them in packs of 10 for 12.50 a pack (+VAT, +post if you don't have an account).

HTH, Stefek

[Rolyata]

Stefek said

sell them ......

Thanks - that's exactly what I was looking for.

Can't imagine how I missed it in the RS catalogue.

[Mike]

Perhaps you were attempting to find it on their website :-)

[Stefek Zaba]

Well, there's an 'undred thousand produx in there, the organisation is a tad idiosyncratic, and the website's not all that welcoming for browsing (since their deep hierarchical organisation has various nodes in it which are just Weird). There's stuff I *know* they sell which I can only ever find with a struggle: Aphel Mains Multiple Units are my particular bugbear in the 'it's there *somewhere*' department. Now that I've burned into my head the name of the manufacturer, I can find it (and I *swear* RS used to call 'em Mains Multiple Units, but now they have the more logical? name of 'Modular Mains Distribution Units'. But if all you have is 'those well-made mains block things which you can daisychain with dedicated 'back-plane' connectors, which you can also get little tee blocks for' - you can spend 10 minutes or more searching at rswww.

In similar vein, I have physical instances of the commoning blocks to hand (well, lurking in a parts bin somewhere not too far away), know I bought them from RS, and still had the name 'commoning block' in my head. If all you have is 'those blocks you use for joining multiple cables together neatly', you're left in RS catsearch hell. Sometimes, keeping a hardcopy of the RS catalogue in close reading reach of the porcelain throne is the best you can do ;-)

Stefek