This is certainly a mess and needs plenty of reworking.

Looking at those most recent pictures, it appears that the system is wired as PME (TN-C-S), so the bonding is definitely not up to standard. The feeder coming into the cut-out/meter board is also an unusual arrangement. How is this connected back to the incoming service?

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Paul, it is one of them old fused both in live and neutral units, and I have a question: were they originally intended to be installed without protective earth wiring? There appears to be no provision for it.
Many of those boxes had no specific earthing provision. In most of the places I've seen that used them, earths were just run outside the box to a block or terminal. (And remember that domestic lighting circuits of the era were seldom run with an earth anyway.)


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the fuse boxes look FAR older than the wiring too. I would assume, looking at them that they are pre 1950?
I'm not sure when that side-handle style unit went out of production, but if the place didn't get power until 1954, my guess would be that somebody used an old unit which happened to be on hand.

The other MEM unit though was certainly made right into the sixties, maybe even the early seventies. MEM seems to have been a favored brand by the electricians in my local area at that time, and there are dozens of these still in service.

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Yet the cables look like they're from the 1970s.
PVC-sheathed cables were certainly installed here from the 1950s onward. If they're Imperial sizes rather than metric (easily discernible by the stranding and tinned appearance) then they date prior to about 1970. Unless it's just the photo, those earths do look like bare copper though.


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Why are there unsheathed cables coming out of the meter (the red ones - obviously ripped out of normal grey sheathed cable)
Hard to tell from the picture, but they may not necessarily be unsheathed. For a time it was possible to obtain double-insulated meter tails which had the outer sheath black or red to match the inner insulation. (And as Gideon mentioned, earlier ones were rubber insulated with a fabric sheath, again of matching color.)

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Didn't anyone spot the burning under the second fuse holder from the left?
Didn't at first, but now you mention it, yes. It looks like the usual carbon deposits from a fuse wire which has blown fairly violently at some point in the past.




[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 04-09-2005).]