Nice job bud. Lots of forward thinking too which is excellent!! As far as the neatness is concerned, I used to beat myself up quite a lot as I was comparing my work in consumer units to the Instagram crowd. There's nothing wrong with the neatness at all! You have a method that works well and I take my hat off to you. Mike.
I always say that over doing the board with tie wraps is bad practice, now the next guy has to put his side cutters near potentially live parts to locate cables for faults as you said. tells me that people that do that never fault find.
So even though they don’t have a main earth, the builder is safe using his cement mixer because the bonding is giving you a sufficient earth fault loop path?
Essentially, yes. My house water main comes in for the first 6” in copper before it turns to plastic. Without the bond in my Ze is 17.8ohm (TT) and connected is 0.26ohm. As it is all plastic now it’s not connected and I couldn’t get to it now if I tried. The regs have a roundabout way of allowing the use of a mains service as an earth rod as long as it is privately owned and not likely to be removed or altered. I’ve seen it done in old mansions where the water board takes their supply to the boundary then connects to a private section of the mains that takes it onwards. Just need to make sure no one digs it up though. I recall better information being in GN8.
I'm not in the industry but he has a result for the resistance of the external earth Ze , also mentioned results of insulation resistance and looks like results for rcbo trip times and continuity of cpc . I'm sure plenty of other pro guys could comment further
@@lewishumphries2893 Earth resistivity test is needed to determine how long the earth electrode should be or how many of them needed. Unlike many European countries (and possibly the North America as well), British regs don't require an electrode for a TNCS system. So British electricians in general are not experienced in conducting earth resistivity test. That's why I am curious to see.
On a job yesterday and the supply to their garage was a swa cable that consisted of a 6mm brown 6 x1mm blue with 6mm earth. So neutral is connected via 6, 1mm cables. I have never seen this cable before. Anyone here know if this is safe. The load should be shared but it's bizzare. I don't want to have to change the cable it's it's safe and sits correct with the regs but I can't find where it's stated otherwise. Cheers to anyone that replies
Sounds like a split concentric cable. A nice cable to use for sub mains that are not buried underground or in the fabric of the building for example, but as far as BS7671 is concerned, in the same position as T&E or any other unprotected cable. Not a replacement for SWA.
One thing to note here is they aren't 6mm and 1mm cables, they are 6mm^2 and 1mm^2 cables. Those figures are cross sectional areas, not diameters. If they were diameters, that wouldn't work. 6 cables with 1/6 the diameter doesn't give you the same current carrying capability. You would need 36 cables. That shouldn't be a problem because cables are always labelled with cross sectional area and that is what you should always be using, but I can imagine a DIYer that doesn't know that measuring the cable they are removing with calipers and realising it is twice the size of the cable they have so running two cables thinking it is equivalent when they actually need four cables (or to go and buy the proper cable!). I would suggest always being precise and writing mm^2 and saying square millimetres just in case anyone ever does get confused.
Why do you think that? The only relevant regulation prescribed by the building regs is that the installation is reasonably safe. Old colour wiring is reasonably safe.
Your consumer unit would have looked a lot better if you had all your neutral tails at the front of the main earth the 2 cpc and the 2 reds and blacks just at the neutral bar side of the consumer unit the rest is ok
