OT: house fires - electrical fault

Or mistakenly using nichrome for fuse wire once when stress relieving pipe welds at a refinery , and the welders not telling me about the glowing wedge hoping it would cause something would go wrong and get them an extra shift.

It's nice when stupidity bites the culprit so immediately and effectively.

Sadly, it's often other people who pay the price.

Sylvia.

When I was in the servicing trade, the real hated job was anything with random fuse blowing.

Its not a method I'd use - but if someone had previously, the job was a lot more work but a predictable end result after replacing all the parts that were damaged.

That's because they are into ring mains and that is the only real way to do ring mains in a domestic situation.

No its not. Our approach works just as well and has the massive advantage that it doesn?t need anything special in the plug and so it can be fully moulded and very unlikely to ever develop a fault.

Very few in fact, not even the ex colonys like HongKong.

It only protects the lead and that isnt usually where a fire happens.

Last time I had a coffee maker blow; as well as popping the breaker, it blew every fuse back to the board.

Normally I'd have just binned it, but I had another coffee maker that was identical in every way except requiring paper filters.

After the element transplant, it was no surprise that the fuse in the plug was blown, but I had to find and replace a couple more before I had power at the outlet.

We've had compulsory moulded 13A plugs for a long time now, the fuse recess is on the base of the plug so you can only get at it with the plug out of the socket.

In the early days there were fuse clip problems with heavy continuous loads like washing machines - but I haven't heard anyone complaining about that for some years ago.

Some people lose the plastic insert so they just push the fuse cartridge into the clips, that sometimes results in the clips ending up splayed and loose - but you can't blame the design for that.

Ian Field wrote

There is no 'every fuse to the board'.

That isnt possible here, there are no fuses in the plug here.

Must be one hell of a shambles of an electrical system to have multiple fuses involved in the chain to that outlet.

And that is all a completely separate matter to the purpose for the fuse in the plug in the british system. No one ever said that the fuse in the plug only ever blows when the lead has a problem.

Yes, but that sort of plug is going to be much less reliable than a fully moulded plug that has no fuse at all.

But it will be much less reliable than a fully moulded plug which has no fuse holder at all.

Corse you can when a fully moulded plug with no fuse can never have that problem.

Tell that to the wall socket that had no power till I found and replaced them.

I'm certain with your attitude, it won't be too long before you find out why a fused plug isn't such a bad idea after all.

More fool you. I wired my entire house that I built on a bare block of land and got a licensed electrician to claim that he had done all the work. And I've been doing that stuff since before you were even born thanks.

Ian Field formulated on Thursday :

Nobody in the world except the Poms, with their determination to be different, have fused plug tops and I havn't looked but I am sure if we were in such danger someone would have changed the rules to follow the UK Australia has had their way since the 1930s but the UK only standardised their system in the 1950s. Why did they not follow an existing workable system? B-)

--
John G Sydney.

** The UK system is very clever and solved a number of issues that had prev iously been a worry.

Wiring outlets as a loop more than doubles the current carrying capacity of the same cable. A 32A loop allows most homes to have only one power circui t.

The 3 pin outlets have safety shutters on the Active and Neutral pins and t he earth pin is at the top, as a safety measure.

Having fused plugs means all appliances have fuses where previously almost none did. The fuse protects against shorts in the cable plus also allows th e use of light gauge cables suited to small and hand held appliances.

The fuses used are special size, ceramic HRC type BS1362, which open before the main breaker in short circuit fault scenarios - so one bad appliance d oes not shut off all power in a home leaving the householder with the trick y problem of discovering which one is to blame. Spare fuses are readily ava ilable.

Plenty of good thinking went into the system.

The one flaw is that users can over fuse a plug - using 13A type where a 3A should be.

.... Phil

The fuses are fast acting HRC types which

Phil Allison wrote

Nope, they didn't invent the ring main.

The ring main does nothing of the sort. In spades with fused plug tops.

And uses less cable than having chains of outlets back to the fuse/breaker box.

That works very poorly now with so many 10A devices in places like the kitchen.

That happened much later.

We don't get a higher rate of electrocutions when we don't.

The fuse isnt there for that. Its there because the ring main fuse has to be high when there is just one ring main for the entire house.

Which isnt in fact a very common problem at all.

We have cables that are light enough without that, most obviously with figure 8 cables to lights etc.

Its normally obvious which appliance has blown the fuse/breaker with our system and easy to unplug the ones on our spurs to find the faulty one if it isnt obvious.

Beakers are much more practical.

Fuck all did in fact and no one else bothers to do it like that.

The other flaw is that a fused plug top can never be as reliable as a modern fully moulded unfused cable.

** Yes it is.

** Never claimed it alone did.

** It works fine.

** Nope - it was part of the 1947 spec.

** It's still a afer way. ** But it does that.

** It's a common enough problem that shuts off all the power here. ** But not with 3 any core cables. ** Like hell it is.

** And blow the circuit fuse or breaker over and over along the way.

It's a crappy way.

** Shame the mad Robot cannot tell good from bad thinking.

..... Phil

You can have the Abbo's round for a barbie when it burns to the ground.

AFAIK: it was mostly about fuckwits hiding the mains flex under carpets. The insulation wears through and often you don't get sufficient fault current to blow the then panel fuse. A "more or less" short was a frequent cause of ignited carpets. The plug top fuse is all about preventing that - but its still possible to create an ignition point before the fuse fails. Its not only important to have that fuse, but to use the lowest rating that will work reliably with the supplied appliance.

The situation has massively improved since compulsory ELCB panels - but fires still happen.

.........................unless you're the kind of f****it that hides the flex under carpets.