ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Spanish Building Codes

There is an English phrase "Spanish Practices", which means long-standing unauthorised working methods. Since it basically refers to the Spanish Inquisition it belongs buried in the 16C. As djk says, most of the horror stories of Spanish building quality stem from cheap package holiday experiences; but the methods of building are different, it's a much drier climate.

Yes, this is a "american" 60Hz power supplied to american 60Hz equipment, but it happens to be located in Spain.

We'll just make sure to do all the questionable parts of the installation in the early afternoon when all the local inspectors are napping

While we're on the topic of other european nations, I've got a similar situation coming up in Italy soon; same deal with being in a US-run building (don't know who exactly "owns" it), but it will be 50Hz in this case. Are Italian codes as lax as the quality of their power?

As the Italian grid is connected with the surrounding grids it's stable at 50 Hz. Otherwise you might have gotten away with a "The power is 60Hz:ish, but kind of low most of the time..."

If you use the NEC, you face a different problem: 120V @ 50 HZ is not a very useful source of power.

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I don't quite agree with DJK. The laws tend to have exceptions for foreign embassies, ships and aircraft etc. A building can effectivly be the domain of another country. I don't see why electrical would be treated any different by a court as it does not affect the buildings around it.

[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 12-04-2005).]

C-H,

I'm not saying it's illegal, just that it's very impractical and often totally unnecessary to have an embassy building running on a different system. It would just make maintenence unnecessarily difficult.

I can see why you might want national standards for equipment that you couldn't purchase to local standards but, it would be really unecessarily expensive to have to fly in contractors from your home country everytime you needed to do some minor changes... not to mention getting parts/appliances/etc

I could understand it on a military base with specialised machinery, very large populations of staff and where all purchasing is done centrally anyway.

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120V 50hz would be pretty useless for a lot of equipment as would 230V 60 hz would be useless for a lot of European appliances in a US / canadian location.


[This message has been edited by djk (edited 12-04-2005).]

I thought that only held true for stuff with timers & clocks - where the accuracy is dependent on the line frequency.

Lamps, radios cassette recorders, adding machines and computers work fine on either 50 or 60 hertz.

I have quite a lot of 120V gear (soldering station, bench DVM, sig gens. etc.) running on 50Hz via a transformer. No problem at all.