… and sometimes the bear eats you
on 05/09/2008 at 04:04 PM
110V Pah that’s for girls! Real men use 240V!! Seriously though Drew I feel your pain. I have had to fix a few ethnic wiring jobs in our house which is only 20 years old. Over here we used to have red for live and black for neutral and green for earth in the house wiring. The consumer part was brown for live, blue for neutral and green/yellow for earth. However the EUrowankers have dictated that we have to have the same crapola throughout the EU so all wiring is now brown live, blue neutral, and green yellow for earth. Oh and they also decided that joe schmoe is not to be trusted doing any external wiring. You have to have a qualified electrician or pay for someone from the local council to come and inspect any external wiring. Being the outlaw type I decided I am not in favour of that and still do it myself. Electricity is dangerous stuff but common sense and care are what you need not some bullshit bureaucracy and jobs for the boys.
I know this one. Since 1972, my mother has been living in a house that was wired by what we called the “spiderweb” or “octopus” method, which is basically to wire everything electrical to everything else electrical and hope it doesn’t burn down when you flip a switch. I have basically spent the last 35 years rebuilding that house one bit at a time. Wiring, plumbing, carpentry, the slab that is less than standard thickness and has no chain wall except in the few places where I poured one. Legend has it (the house is 50 years old or so) that the first owner built this house himself. I don’t know what he did for a living, I think he was a lawyer. What I can be *certain* of is that he didn’t work in ANY of the construction trades.
I feel sorry for you guys subject to EU codes on something so low level as wire colors.
US household wire colors are very easy and have been standard for a long time. Lots of easy ways to remember them too. “Green grass grows on the ground; natural as nature so it could be naked.” (because the ground wire if often bare, or merely paper covered, in the lighter gage wires). The problems come up because wire lasts a very long time, and there are many homes built long before the codes were standardized. There are even houses still using cloth wrapped wire with glass stand-offs. Run away! Run away!!
I hear you GoF, with the octopus rig. Run the mains up to the attic and then drop them into every room. Because it saves you the effort of drilling across studs; just one hole down from the cap. Save as much money as possible by ganging 6 or more sockets off the same 15 amp breaker. Aaarrggh!!! My mother’s house was made that way. One usable outlet in the kitchen. Until my brother and I did some workarounds a few years ago by installing a couple new circuits, to make toast in the kitchen she had to make sure the dining room light was off, as well as the clothes dryer in the basement. D’oh!! The entire downstairs of the house was on 3 circuits. Because breakers cost 20 cents in those days. Double D’oh!
Peiper 240v is inherently more dangerous than 110v but I have had a few zaps from 240V and am still here to tell the tale. Must have a strong constitution I guess. From my experience I would say UK electrical installations are better than the US. In the US I have often seen wall sockets in bathrooms. This is not allowed in the UK. Or where it is the socket has to be a minimum safe distance from the bath or shower and is linked to an earth leakage circuit breaker. I have seen this in Canadian installations and I expect it is standard in the US now, but there are a lot of households in the US where you could plug a hair dryer into the wall and have it drop in the sink or bath. A potentially lethal situation. I have never seen a UK bathroom where this situation would be permitted.
Another important factor with UK power is the plugs. Unless double insulated all electrical equipment must have an earth/ground and all mains plugs have an earth pin that connects before the live/neutral pins engage. Also the live and neutral on the wall sockets have shutters which only open when the earth pin has been connected. This precludes people inserting things like “bobby pins” into the power. Oh and the live neutral pins have insulators half way down so you can’t wrap your fingers around the plug and touch the pins and get a shock. There aren’t many things where the UK is better than the US but when it comes to “electrickery” our domestic set-up is a lot better than what I remember from the US.
05/10/2008 at 05:16 AM
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