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Texas_Ranger wrote

Have you noticed that they have changed the colour coding again earlier this year?

Yellow/green, Blue, Brown, Black, Grey
(G, N, L1, L2, L3)

No major change, but it applies to all cables, both solid and flexible. (And to all European countries including the UK, AFAIK)
You can continue to install the old cables up to 2006, but they will go out of production this year.

Oh!
Wasn't L3 black as well? I never installed 3ph, but i once saw an old cable with the colors grey, black, blue and pink for N, L1, L2, L3, ungrounded.
When our school was completely renovated (close to demolition with only the facade remaining) Some ingenious guy managed to miswire the phases of the table saw outlet in the woodworking class. Our teacher was pretty surprised as the blade ran backwards! I think he didn't bother until bureaucracy cared to send an electrician but fixed it himself. (Everything incorporating school authorities is pretty slow and complex, like probably everything concerning governments.)

In Austria, probably yes since it was in Germany.
But surely you must have installed 3-way light switches using five core cable?

[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 09-24-2002).]

[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 09-24-2002).]

No, not necessarily. From the junction box to the switch mostly 3x1.5 is used (illegal but common since long ago, I've seen 3way switching using th red ground wire, to give a view) Accepted practice would be running 4x1.5 (brown, black, blue and yellow-green), yet it is more common to use conduit with the same colors for both travelers. Sometimes (when a receptacle is to be fed as well) 5x 1.5 is used, the phase to the switch taken from the receptacle, on the other side of the arrangement... I've to admit I've never seen such a setup using cable. When I did this myself I parraleled two cables.

U.K. specifications say that all phase conductors in a flexible cord should be brown, with lettered or numbered tags if phase identification is required.

Color coding here is somewhat of a mess, because although we adopted the common European system for flexible cords, the colors in our fixed cables stayed with the traditional red, yellow, blue, black [L1,L2,L3,N]. (For cables made prior to 1965 the L2 or B-phase was white instead of yellow.)

Another point: Has anyone noticed that the original European specification for color coding called for the neutral to be light blue? The shade of blue in some of the cords manufactured today is very dark.

Here in Austria it rather was dark blue with older cables. (Probably)since lead-free colorshave come up it has become light blue.

Just goes to show how different things can be in this supposedly standardized part of the world!

Many of the cords made here in the early 1970s have a truly light blue neutral!