Why do circuit breakers go up for on and down for off?

Now cows where adobe was used and cow s*it can't be used to turn it ijnto bricks either.

Cheap at half the price 😈

That was our experience when we bought this house (UK) - they would only give us temporary cover while we got it re-wired.

It was _legal_ to leave the old wiring there, but it wasn't safe.

Andy

How annoying. The British fuses you could stick any in any socket, and you could put any fusewire in each too. My house, I put in what I want. Complete:

At 240V, I have 5A (lights), 15A (water heater), 30A (cooker or shower or all the sockets in the house). Even if you're the sissy 120V, 8A would pretty much manager lights, even with the old incandescents.

Again, enough for lighting. Saves having heavy guage wire everywhere.

Take it apart and fit a bigger one.

Better with them in the plugs, then it depends on the appliance. I can plug a table lamp into a 13amp socket, but the lamp has a 3A wire. The fuse protects the wire. Plug fuses are 1A, 2A, 3A, 5A, 7A, 10A, 13A. But for some reason shops tend to sell 3, 5, 13. To get the others (obviously being a lot safer) you have to use mail order.

Looks like a jewelery box, what do I do with that?

Isn't that a French duck?

That's a pathetic size. Mine is 1.5kW (not an invertor) which was the smallest one I could buy (apart from one half the size for 90% of the cost, which is just stupid). Why have an invertor? Mine just power cycles. It will also reverse to heat.

Insurance is a scam, get rid of it. Put the money in savings to pay for anything that probably won't happen.

My insurance company never saw my wiring. None of their business.

Mine still does. No false trips here. Only blown one once. A faulty halogen spotlight. Those things were s*it.

Ah, that nice bendy stuff instead of the stiff s*it they use nowadays. I always wire things with flex. The ends are easier to get into the connectors too.

Like what?

You don't need either.

Even then you don't.

Electricity usually doesn't kill. It has to pass through your heart, and you have to have a heart defect. I've had seven 240V shocks right through my torso, just made me jump. Not painful, not harmful.

Fuses have even less chance of false trips.

Fuses are a fraction of that.

Meanwhile I spent all that on a holiday.

And yet you would have replaced it.

Fuses prevent fire, that's all you need.

I was always surprised that all the fuse-wire holders in a UK fuse box were interchangeable - there was nothing to stop you inserting a 15 A lighting-circuit fuse in the slot for a 30 A ring-main. Everything would be fine until someone turned on both a kettle and and electric fire on the same ring main (thereby drawing more than 13A) and the 15 A fuse would blow.

It would have been better if the fuse holders had been designed to have different size pins to avoid this. Of course there would still be nothing to stop someone wiring 30 A wire into a 15 A holder, but that is (probably) less likely than someone pulling out several fuses and then putting them back in the wrong locations. At least the fuse holders and sockets in the fuse box were colour-coded with domino spots which had to match.

I wouldn't describe a mains shock as "not painful". It definitely hurt: a sharp throbbing while the current was flowing (until I managed to pull my hand away or the ELCB tripped) and a tingling and dull ache for about an hour after.

I imagine different people are affected differently by the same voltage of shock. I used to know a woman at university who could feel voltages of a few volts through her fingers - she could touch the terminals of an AA battery (eg between finger and thumb) and tell whether it was dead. She described 9 V from a PP9 battery as "uncomfortable".

I've only ever had AC shocks - a couple of mains shocks between fingers or between different parts of the same finger knuckle - and those pulsate because of the AC. I'm not sure what an equivalent DC shock feels like - and I'm in no hurry to find out ;-) The worst shock was from terminals of a transformer in a valve-powered tape recorder and that was about 400 V AC - probably from the input that fed the HT for the valves - which "killed" my arm for a while and caused me to gash my hand on a sharp bit of solder on the circuit board as I pulled my hand away. Strangely, getting that shock fixed a problem with the tape recorder: I can only assume that there was a bad connection which was fixed when I jolted the circuit board.

Wrap a strand of copper wire between the two screws. That's the fuse.

...

With cycles the temperature also cycles, up to four degrees. With an inverter AC the temperature stays fixed at the mark and stays silent.

In my youth, that's how we detonated our home made explosives. a short length of fuse wire or a strand from a multicore flex, , a battery - often just a lantern battery, and some match heads...

I never tried it with the 1.5V cells, not having a tongue like an anteater.

tirsdag den 21. februar 2023 kl. 10.35.06 UTC+1 skrev NY:

thin moist skin

I nearly said that the "tongue test" works for batteries, but then tongues are a lot more sensitive than fingers (oo, Matron"). In lieu of an anteater's tongue, a little bit of wire shows that the tongue can also detect 1.5 V. Done it also with those flat 4.5 batteries with two springy brass terminals, as used in torches in the past.

It must be a fake!

Just touch the other end of the battery with your wet finger. The tongue test works fine.

I don't see how that could be. There are maybe 100,000 wooden houses in the Baltimore area and I don't think more than 50 burn down a year. That's 5/100's of a percent, which means it would take 2000 years for them all to burn down. Is that what you mean by eventually? We lose about 10 or 20 very nice houses a year by new owners tearing them down to build something bigger or nicer. As neighborhoods get older, that number is surely increases, before they have a chance to burn down.