Hi all,
We recently moved to a 70s house, where from the survey, and my inspection pre sale, the electrical installation was in pretty good nick, if somewhat limited in numbers of sockets.
Having now spent the last few months crawling around the innards of the house I now have a much more comprehensive understanding of the electrical installation, and one item that initially worried me was that the power cables, and some of the lighting cables, are in PVC insulated copper coated aluminium cable. However, despite the well documented problems in the US with plain aluminium cable, this Cu/Al cable seems OK. The PCV is flexible, showing no sign of cracking or leaching, and the copper wire surface is bright, and showing no sign of adhering to the PVC. I've now replaced about half of the rather tatty 13A sockets, and most of the light switches, and none of the connections were showing signs of creep, oxidation, heating, and other nasties, which accords with the comment in
The ring cable has seven strands for phase and neutral, with an overall diameter of 2.3mm, and a single strand CPC of 1.3mm diameter, which in terms of its performance looks to me like a composite of imperial copper 7/029 equivalent for phase/neutral, and the equivalent of 1mm metric copper CPC. Lighting cable has three strands at 1.4mm overall, and a 1mm CPC. Given that the rings are on the RCD side of the CU, and are fed via 30A MCBs, it seems to me that the cable can continue in service where necessary (with appropriate testing.)
I can't find any information on the current capacity and performance of Cu/Al cables - does anyone have any thoughts or info here, as to whether my assumptions as to their continued use are correct? The cables are marked "Enfield-Standard Johnson and Phillips 600/1000V Copperclad" incidentally.
Which brings me on to my second query. I now need to join a number of cables, and to do it neatly in a comparatively small space. The obvious solution is to use crimps, and the seven stranded cables will just go neatly into blue crimps. I would, of course, use a decent ratchet crimp tool. Given all the above a properly made crimped joint looks as though it should be fine, but wondered if the team has any experience here?
One last comment - the wiki section on crimping
Thanks for your thoughts and comments,
Charles F