Re: British (european?) kitchen counter electric outlets

Sort of;

The UK is traditionally 240V along with many other UK influenced countries such as Australia. While mainland Europe was 230V.

To achieve a common standard without any physical changes the tolerances are asymmetric at 230V +10%/-6%. (As of 2022 the standard has now been widened to be 230V +10%/-10%).

The UK is normally described as having 240V AC power.

kw

Ok. Most of the all country power adapters I have are labeled 100-240V 50-60 Hz so I hope they were designed for up to 255V.

Yes it's known as a cavity wall. Our house was like that, and there was no such thing as drywall (or plasterboard as it would be known in the UK). The inside wall is plastered with plaster by the plasterers (people who do the plastering).

Outside the UK you'll probably get redirected to:

Yes

I've never done plastering myself but I think it goes directly on the bricks.

It's likely that plasterboard (drywall) is more popular now.

It does go directly onto the bricks but not as one single layer.

Usually a bonding layer of coarse plaster is applied first. Before it is dry, to assist the bonding to the next layer, the surface is scratched all over with a series of light marks, like criss-crosses, made with the point of a trowel. After that first layer has set-off, the second 'finishing' coat is applied. That is a much finer-grained plaster and can be smoothed to a mirror finish by a skilled plasterer.

To assist in keeping the surface level, wooden battens are sometimes tacked to the brickwork first, to give a series of parallel surfaces. Once the bulk of the coarse plaster has been put on it can be levelled by scraping with a straight-edge laid across the battens. Then the battens are dug out and the channels which remain are filled with plaster. Thin galvanised steel angle sections can be used on outward-facing corners; these are provided with expanded metal edges which key into the plaster, so they are left in place.

All this work has to be done at high speed because the freshly-mixed plaster thickens-up quite quickly and becomes difficult to work. Its workable life can be extended to a limited extent by adding a little more water and 'beating it up', but that is not good practice. .

The house design he describes is relatively modern transition probably around the 1930's. Pre 1910 and solid wall is much more likely. Anything habitable built post WWII is likely to be cavity wall with two walls of

There is an industry of cavity wall insulation retrofitted to these older originally air gap based insulation buildings.

There have been a few scandals where bad builders forgot the gap ties! Or worse deliberately left them out because of bad practice!

My own house is much older (early Victorian and of handmade imperial size bricks). Its outer walls are three courses of solid high fired Victorian engineering brick. It is difficult to drill through since there are enough nice round flints in the brick clay matrix to make drills snatch.

Last tradesman to try in my house ruined a core drill in the process and had to go off and buy another to finish the job.

Sometimes they did use chicken wire to make thick plaster stay. Most houses they don't bother and the plaster is in two grades a coarse grey one with horsehair or other binder in it ~2cm and a final thin skim

Chickenwire plays hell with Wifi (as does the density of the brickwork). The thickest walls right in the core of my house are about 4' thick where the kitchen range used to be.

Houses this old tend to have curtain rails and sometimes as is the case in my house a dado rail at furniture height in addition. eg.

They get around it by having an asymmetric error band on the nominal UK

I recall some cheap and nasty US made razors that depend on a 60Hz mechanical resonance to work so that in the UK at 50Hz they are next to useless.

The lowest I have ever seen my mains voltage was just under 200v when one of the three phases had gone down (not my phase). I didn't notice at all until I tried to boil the kettle because almost everything these days is so voltage tolerant. LED light bulbs just draw more current so do computers and their displays.

Incandescent bulbs were really dim on that low voltage (I still have one or two in seldom used locations).

Some buildings here had plywood finished with bricks. They would lay a row of bricks, add a few nails into the wood along the top of the bricks, and add mortar and another row of bricks.

In our old art-Deco place on Judah Street, in the 1989 earthquake, there was a 4-story apartment building next door, and all 4 floors of bricks peeled off and hit the sidewalk. By some miracle, nobody was walking there at the time. One brick could have been lethal.

The main killers in the '89 quake were the freeway collapse in Oakland and bricks in SF.

(Google maps, 320 Judah Street, San Francisco, Street View. The apartment to the right is shod in wood now.)

East Coast cities rarely have quakes, but a place like Boston or NYC will be rubble when they do.

I don't know how common this was, but a house I lived in, which was built in 1901, had cavity walls. All the terraces of houses in that area, which were built between 1895 and 1905, had cavity walls, even though they were built down to a price for sale to ordinary working families.

The actual materials were a very poor quality local brick for the interior wall and Bath Stone (Oolite) for the outer. The courses were laid with gas slag mortar, which was made in a pug mill on site from lime and the residue from the local gasworks.

During WWI a bomb went off near one of the terraces and the shock wave propagated through the clay soil, jarring dozens of houses. The houses appeared not to be too badly damaged and the cracked mortar joints soon repaired themselves (mortar is self-healing). A decade later it was noticed that a lot of them were suffering from rising damp. The shock of the bomb had dislodged the mortar 'snots' on the cavity side of each wall, they fell down to the bottom of the cavity and filled it to a level which bridged the damp course with a load of porous wet material.

The builders had provided air vents on the outside and omitted corresponding bricks in the inner wall, to increase the underfloor air circulation. I found it was possible to worm my way along under the floor, reach into the cavity through the missing brick holes and pull out bucketloads of the wet material by hand. It was a very unpleasant job but it solved the damp problem.

That reminds me of a time when I was working in the US and a friend from the UK came to stay. His razor came with various adapter cords but none would fit any outlet we could find. So we went to radio shack and bought a cable which did fit a local outlet. The we cut and joined two of the cables together to make the necessary adapter cord. Then we found that his razor still didn't work because it was designed for 50Hz resonance.

That is new construction. Adding, for instance, a receptacle to a finished wall - studs with finish surface on both sides - the wire can be 'fished' in the wall without supports. Similarly in other closed spaces. You can extend from an existing box, but that may not be easy. May involve making a small hole that is then patched. Fishing may also involve holes.

Remember that the void has steel wall ties about every 18" in each direction so the cables are resting on them but not tied down. They are fairly rigid so don't move once they are installed.

Convention is that most horizontal wiring is out of sight under the floor above or on the surface of timbers in the loft. In theory I think the code requires them to be anchored every couple of feet. In practice I have seen plenty of loose wires straggling across spaces (and even more horrific plumbing mistakes). In older homes where electricity was a later addition the cables are often buried in the plasterwork. Modern build they tend to be inside stud walls or the cavity. I've never looked to see how they do it but I'm pretty sure the brickies build the walls and the sparks only move in when the house is watertight with a roof on.

You could do either depending on which was easier. Breaking into a ring main isn't that hard and that is the normal configuration in the UK.

In theory I think that is true in the UK too and most of it is. But not all installers are diligent and building inspections these days are cursory to non-existent.

It is amazing to watch a good plasterer at work.

Foil coated foam insulation is another common Wifi blocker too.

That is early for cavity walls. It is possible that in cities the larger builders doing big projects used it sooner than those out in the sticks.

Stuff built as late as 1910 in my vicinity of North Yorks (and by a respected landowner and ironmaster) are all solid wall construction in best quality Edwardian high fired brick. It was and still is a model Edwardian village - architects still come here to study.

Mostly Grade II listed buildings too so any improvements have to be done very very carefully to preserve the external appearance.

The really expensive landed gentry properties here are in grit stone or sandstone (which is slightly porous so not an ideal building material).

My old Victorian, built in 1892, had walls made of 2x4 studs (is that a cavity wall?) with lath and plaster, some rooms updated to drywall. No insulation. Knob and tube wiring.

The foundation and chimney were brick. The mortar was probably mixed with sea water, and the salt leached out so the mortar could be removed with a fingernail.

The chimney crumbled in the 1989 quake so I took it apart a brick at a time and left a nice open skylight in the kitchen.

Zillow says it's worth 21 times what I paid for it.

I suspect there may have been another reason:

A Midlands industrialist bought the land and made his money selling it off in small parcels for local builders to develop . The area was exceptionally rich in clay and, as part of the speculation, he also established and operated a brick & tile works.

Brick houses would not have sold well in Bath (they may even have been banned under planning laws) so the appearance of the houses had to be Bath Stone, which already supported a considerable quarrying industry in the surrounding area. By making the houses with a cavity wall, the outer appearance could be expensive Bath Stone and the inner structure local brick (of atrocious quality), thereby keeping the price down and supporting both industries.

I suspect there may have been some coercion clause in the building contracts to force the use of local brick, because I know of no other areas in Bath where the builders used it voluntarily.

No but the thickness of the cable and three solid core strands of copper make it almost rigid enough to be self supporting for 3' upwards and 3' down from above. Add in a bit of friction and it really doesn't move.

Shorts caused by drilling or nailing into a mains cable can and do happen here too. At worst it should blow a fuse and at best take down a circuit breaker for unbalanced live neutral. Likewise for water pipes buried in plasterwork (which are much messier if you hit them with a nail).

You start from an existing fixture and track the cable back. Easy now that there are decent mains wiring detectors not so easy back in the

They are called spurs in UK and are allowed with restrictions.