ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Would like to see...

That the guy was born in czechoslovakia may have affected his mentality, but his education must have been in Austria, so it doesn't change much. As i said, we have some strange guys here. like the one who installed a fully grounded system in our appartment with Schuko receptacles everywhere and then "forgot" the ground between main fuse in staircase and our breaker panel 25 years ago.
I found out about that yesterday...
That guy was licensed!

About spanish wiring: I have only been there once on holidays and can just remember loose hot wires dangling around like grapevines, open receptacles and stuff like that. maybe they also had 110 V back then. (At least in one country my father tried to hook up a hairdryer to a standard outlet and wondered why it ran so slow-110V)

The wildest extension cord practice I ever saw was in fact in the US (Brooklyn, NYC). It's nice to have a 15A/120V duplex receptacle extended to 12 outlets using various taps, extension cords and strips.

That pretty much sums up my experience of Spanish wiring as well. They often seem to have the attitude "It works, so what's the fuss?"

You see missing cover plates, wires just twisted and shoved into a box (not even taped!), grounding-type receptacles with no ground on them, and so on.

I once saw a bathroom light switch with exposed live terminals (220V to ground) right by the shower. And this wasn't some old ramshackle place but a fairly fancy modern hotel in a major tourist area!

Tex,
I'm not sure if there might still be one or two remote parts of Spain still on the lower voltage, although I think all the built-up areas are 220/380 now.

There may have been places with a nominal 110V supply, but I think in many areas the lower voltage was actually nominally 127V, because it was derived from a 3-phase network with a line-to-line potential of 220V.

Did they ever use 110/220 1-ph 3-wire in Spain? I'm not sure. I have references that indicate that NEMA (U.S. type) 2-prong outlets were used on 110-127V at one time.

What I was thinking of was Mallorca some 15 years ago.
At www.kropla.com Spain is now listed to have 230V/50Hz, Schuko plugs. I don't have any further informations.

Hi, Paul.
Hate to show off my ignorance here (especially since I have so much to show...) Would you please explain what a "Ring Circuit" is to me? If I were to make a wild guess, I would think it was a circuit which receives its power source from more than one place...

Thanks for any info you (or anyone else) can give me.

Mike (mamills)

Mike,

The ring circuit consists of cables run from the panel to each receptacle in turn, then back to the panel to complete the ring. It's been the most common sysem for feeding recepts. in British homes for many years (lights are on separate circuits here).

Forgive me if I don't go into a long explanation again, but allow me to refer you to the treads "Hello from U.K" and "Ring circuits U.K. style" in this section where we had quite a discussion about rings.

Texas,

The hotel I mentioned above was actually in Majorca -- Magalluf to be exact.

The new EU-wide 230V standard seems to be more political than anything else at the moment. The U.K. is now officially 230V, even though nothing has happened to our 240V supplies. All they've done is juggle with the permitted tolerances so that they can call it 230 volts! I have no up-to-date information on Spain, but I wouldn't mind betting that they've done something similar and that their supplies are still really 220V.

Considering Spain's often poorly regulated supply and undersized cables where outlet voltage can easily be down to 190V on heavy load, it probably doesn't make much difference anyway!

Here in Austria we actually have 230V instead of 220. I measured between 228 and 234.
In Italy it is pretty much the same with the voltage drop. They have very long 230V supply lines (sometimes several kilometres), so some houses only get as low as 190V.
Maybe some words about italian wiring.
Their work looks more like American than ours, as their boxes are not round, but rectangular and about the same size as American ones. They'll either take a single or triple receptacle or up to 3 switches. Wirenuts are the only common connectors (I only saw one color-yellow-but don't know if it has anything to do with the size).Stranded wire is very common there, they use it mostly in pvc flex conduit.Some receptacles will either take a Schuko plug or an Italian one, old plugs looked very much like Euro plugs. Common service in rural areas is only 20A/230V single phase for a whole house. old work was usually done with very thin zip cord with big gaps between the conductors, just nailed to the wall (They drove the nails into the gap between the conductors).

Interesting about Italian wiring. I've never been to Italy, so I had no idea what techniques they used. All I knew was the old-style Italian outlets with three round pins in line, ground on the center and reversible. Didn't they have ones with a slightly wider pin spacing for 16A and a the smaller version for 10A?

Single-phase 20A service must be very limiting. I thought the 3-ph at 15A per phase in some French homes was bad, but a max. total load of under 5kW must take some beating. I guess gas ranges must be popular in Italy.

Assuming that some houses have electric heating, do they have the heating cut-off contactors found in some French homes?

By the way, how are you getting used to your new currency? I'll have to adapt to to the Euro when I head for France shortly.

Texas,

Just thought I'd jump in here with a comment.
I recently did work for an Italian couple that lived in the US and worked in Italy for some months out of the year. I didn't ask details, but was curious how they could do that. (?) But anyway, they were telling me that where they were from the only wiring method used or allowed was a conduit system.

When wiring had to be installed in their existing buildings they first had to channel out a path for the conduit which would then get covered over with concrete or stucco. They were amazed to see the wiring inside of their US apartment ceiling and walls that was seemingly without protection.

Bill

The examples I'm talking of were in a dserted village in the Toscana, the wiring was probably very old. New work seems to use stranded wire in conduit. With the limitations, I guess it may be better in cities, I only know wiring in very rural areas. 10 years ago they used oil lamps and propane gas lighting there, some people still do.
They simply have both types of plugs, they're sold everywhere. The ones for 16A have also slightly thicker prongs, everything else looks the same.
The Euro works, but it's difficult. Some machines (like the public xerox machine I wanted to use today still only take our old Schilling coins, and some things get (illegally) slightly more expensive due to the changes. (They just round up the prices to a nice Euro sum)
Yes, that's what work is usually done around here. We have mostly plastered brick walls, so wiring dangling around in hollow spaces is quite uncommon (even in plaster-and-lath ceilings we usually use conduit (Almost only PVC flex conduit) Here in Austria we also use Romex in plaster, but conduit is the better choice for adding wires afterwards. On my opinion it is sometimes scaring what you see in America (especially that nice variety of adaptors and taps they sell at Home Depot, or homemade extensions like "how do I make one cord with more recptacles out of 2". Tht happens everywhere but I'm sometimes tempted to think that some Americans may pay less attention towards electricity due to the lower voltage.
I don't want to offend anyone, there are many people there who think a lot about safety, it was just scary to travel around there and see stuff like that.

I guess everywhere has its points that seem strange to outsiders. Just ask most people here what a 4-way stop is, and you'll get all sorts of blank looks!

We have nothing like the grounding adapters sold in America -- the ones to convert an old 2-prong outlet to a grounding type with a lug that fixes under the cover-plate screw. I wonder how many people use them without checking whether the box is properly grounded in the first place?

That sort of thing comes as a surprise to many Brits, but then Americans might also raise a few eyebrows at our unprotected service entrance cables and whole houses with only four branch circuits.

The same rounding-up of prices happened here in 1971 when Britain changed from the old LSD (pounds, shillings & pence) to decimal currency. It was the start of the massive inflation of the 1970s.

Bill,

Was that couple's divided year in the U.S and Italy some sort of immigration work-around? I could quite easily live in America for 6 months a year on a visitor's visa with no questions asked, so long as I wasn't working there.



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 01-11-2002).]