ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades International D-I-Y store chains?

Here in the USA the two big ones that are left are Home Depot and Lowe's. These are the stores that some of us on ECN call "the big orange box" and the "big blue box" respectively.

We used to have smaller ones -- Pergament (which I thought was huge until Home Depot opened a store across the street from our local), RIckel (never got a chance to go to), Martin Paints (spec. in paints, carpets, floors, some decorative lumber and light fixtures), but they all went out of business as Home Depot and Lowes expanded.

In terms of small electrical wiring devices (plugs, sockets, switches), Home Depot carries mostly Leviton and Lowes carries Cooper/Eagle.

Home Depot is the biggest of the two. Their stores are very messy and sometimes you can't find what you need when you need it. Of course, when you don't need it anymore it's there.

Lowe's keeps a tidier layout -- you don't see merchandise lying all over the floor.

Mexico has Home-Mart, although it doesn't have an entirely national presence -- there are no stores in the state of Baja California, but there are some in Quintana Roo (so if I ever visit Cancun....).


[This message has been edited by SvenNYC (edited 10-12-2003).]

Stock managers not realizing what they're ordering sounds as though it may well be a feasible explanation for Irish stores carrying fittings of little or no use, although I suppose places up near the border may shift some.

I've never noticed this sort of problem in Britain: All the electrical items you'll find in the average hardware or DIY store are things which would be used here.

On telephone equipment, the only area where I've found people run into problems from time to time is with modems. I've sorted out a few cheap imports which have a BT plug on the cord, but the line is connected to the wrong pins (inner pair instead of outer).

I've noticed BT itself does a weird thing with their phones.

They crimp on the BT connector and the RJ11 at the phone end. Then, obviously to make wiring simple they connect the phone internally to the "wrong" terminals of the RJ11 socket. So the line's carried on the 2nd pair rather than the middle pair (as would be normal in the US or Ireland) basically RJ11 wired like a BT phone plug.

The result is that if you plug a normal RJ11 cable in nothing happens as the line's not connected.

If you plug their BT cable into an Irish phone you get nothing either if you try to use it in the UK as it carries the line on the wrong RJ11 pins.

Yes, that's a favorite trick for telephones supplied to the U.K. market. It makes for a simple straight-thru cord with the BT plug on one end and a U.S.-type modular on the other. One of the inner contacts is used as the bell feed via the capacitor in the master jack.

It would have made things much simpler if the BT plugs had been designed with the center pair for the line, but at the time this specification was laid down in the early 1980s the U.S. type jacks were not used on domestic phones here.

The "geeks" among us had them on imported modems at that time, but of course it was illegal to connect non-approved equipment to the line, so no official design was going to take that into account!

I'm going off at a tangent slightly now, but one problem people have here with modems is tone recognition. I had to sort this out for someone just recently with a brand new, but no-name modem.

The modem was seeing the British double-ring tone as a busy signal and kept dropping the line and redialing. Easy enough to correct by changing the registers, but this was supplied by the big chain PC World, and supposedly with drivers and defaults for the U.K. market to make it easy to set up.

I have never really noticed a problem with modems and the double beat ring tone however. There used to be loads of problems with the voicemail and call divertion tones here which originally were broken dial tones. They got around this by changing it to 2 different frequencies that just switch in and out so the modem still hears a continious tone but the caller hears the dial tone stepping up and down.

450Hz + 350Hz
call diversion is equal time with each tone
message waiting is the normal 450 hz tone rapidly interupted with the 350hz.

Also if you set modems to UK sometimes you had problems with recognising the ring tone here particularly in exchanges that still apply the progress tone (bebebebebebe) while they were waiting for a free modem at the ISP.

The progress tone's rarely heard on fixed line calls these days. I think it's actually being phased out under some ITU rules. I notice France Telecom seem to be using it less and less too.

Even though it's MUCH more rapid than a busy tone or a "reorder tone" ? the cheapo modems used to see it as busy.

I actually like the Irish tone system. It's extremely easy to understand compared to what i've heard elsewhere and that's not just because I'm used to it. It's just very self-explanatory.

Dialtone = continious 450Hz.
Busy = 450hz busy tone (similar to UK)
Congestion = same
The is no number unobainable tone it's always an announcement or the 3 tone dooo deee dooo.. thing.
Ring tone is same as the UK

I've found a lot of the European systems confusing and I don't like the non-warbling flat ring tones used in Europe. I prefer ours it's much more like what a phone sounds like ringing.

Even if they didn't change the actual ring pattern sent to the phones I think it would be nice if for once the rest of Europe adopted our system rather than the DIN / NF standard

We seem to have gotten a couple more telephone related discussions the last few days, so in order to avoid hijacking this topic any further (sorry C-H!), I'll follow up in the Telephone talk thread,

Back on the DIY in general, if Ireland has places which seem to stock items that nobody would use, has anybody found big stores which for some reason don't carry common items?


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 10-15-2003).]

Yes, RCD's in the prewired panels. The chains in Sweden all have a couple of prewired panels, but only last year they began to include RCD's in some of the models. I don't know any place in a home or farm where someone could legally use the type of panel without RCD.

[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 10-16-2003).]

Generally in Ireland a consumer can't buy any serious electrical equipment other than sockets, lightswitches, minor DIY job stuff very easily.

You certainly can't buy a full distribution panel / fuse box / consumer unit in a DIY store. Electrical wholesalers will sell them but they tend to be trade-only or vet their customers pretty seriously.

Also if you install anything that requires replacing the distribution panel/fuse box it legally requires a completion certificate to be submitted to the power company.

You're not allowed to change anything but light switches and socket outlets without a license. Few but the electricians union care.

Maybe where there's already an RCD as a separate unit? Or don't you use that arrangement in Sweden?

The panels sold in the big stores here are generally available with either a main switch or main RCD pre-installed, so the buyer then just has to add the required selection of fuses or breakers.

Laws making it illegal to do anything beyond replacing a light switch or something equally trivial seem to me to be unenforcable. We have such laws here already relating to gas and to notification when connecting certain items to drainage systems and so forth. In this area at least, the laws appear to be completely ignored.

There has never been anything to stop a homeowner carrying out wiring on his own house in England, and although I do not like the dangerous mess that sometimes results from DIY wiring, I think we need to be very careful before bringing in restrictive laws that stop a person doing what he wants in his own home.