Which make of Consumer Unit?

I chose MK recently, purely on the basis that I have never been let down by their gear.

It may be better value to buy one of the pre-populated ones?

Hager is very solid and the range of devices is excellent. Also you are less likely to find you can't buy a new MCB or RCBO that fits (properly) in 10 years time like one crap brand I had dealings with.

If you can stump up the dosh, consider going all RCBOs - it's a superior system to a couple of RCDs.

You can't have "unprotected" MCBs for anything much now - all sockets need to be RCD protected and unless you are cunning with the cabling, the routing of that tends to demand RCD protection.

One thing you could consider (what I did) as 14 circuits is a lot and clearly some of yours are external:

Take a 40A +/- RCBO circuit to a secondary CU nearer where your external circuits go (possibly even an external building if that makes sense to run on from there) and populate that with MCBs.

Keeps the clutter down in the main CU and does save a bit of dosh by putting several non critical external circuits on one RCBO.

Of course, if you have critical stuff outside (eg freezer) this makes no sense...

Already been beaten to it by Tim:-)

Hager.

BTW Did you recheck the tightness of your terminals on your CU?

Hmm I've now seen other recommendations for Hager and a few negative comments about MK - I'll investigate further.

The plan is to put the critical stuff on RCBOs, but I'll look at the cost difference with Hager.

Understood, but the sheds and car charger all have their own RCDs.

I'm trying to do the opposite. At the moment I have two sub mains from the garage to old Wylex fuseboards (one for lighting and one for sockets) in the centre of the house, plus a whole bunch of small CUs in the garage. I want to consolidate the whole mess into one location: probably one CU for the house and a second one for the garage, workshop, sheds and outside sockets.

Now that I've looked around some more I've seen a few people moaning about MK quality.

Because of the number of radial circuits the pre-pop units don't have the mix I need

I did, and they were good and tight. I suspect that means I grossly overtightened them the first time round.

Indeed - there is no right and wrong here.

My CU was a bit full (I like to leave gaps between each pair of RCBO for cooling) and all my external circuits exit from the other side of the house - so it made sense to put a secondary CU upstairs near the exit point.

I also had to site a small CU over a doorway thanks to EDF's annoying 3m rule on meter tails...

I don't normally ave anything good to say about American power systems, but the fecking enormous breaker panels they install does make things much more pleasant to work with:

There is no is such thing as grossly overtighten-;)

It just means you did the job properly first time. I consider the extra time you spent rechecking them to be time well spent.

Nice one.

Chint are on Deal of the Day next Thurs at Screwfix.

Beware anyone booking a CU change for next Friday :-)

Owain

... makes more space for the pig's ears

Owain

I've never been an MK fan. Top end prices - but definitely not top end design. And in terms of looks, well behind many others. And as for reliability in normal domestic use, not sure there's that much difference between any reputable brand.

Tighten them till they groan. ;-)

I am not sure if they are the re badged MGCs from CEF or the other way around. Either way a pile of s*it.

The one thing I can say for MK is that at least they make MCBs that cannot be fitted with the bus bar terminal behind the MCB terminal.

But yet all schools and hospitals around my way always seem to spec MK stuff (apart from DBs).

This is not, unfortunately, true of traditional junction boxes.

Everyone knows the correct way is:

Tighten it until the head snaps off;

Do the replacement up slightly less tight.

Probably because it's the only name the architect knows. Given it's been around for ever.