From the troublesome house, this is a junction box I chopped out during the work. This is not the approved way of wiring British junction boxes!





As you might expect, the box was not fixed to anything and the cables were hanging loose.

Paul,
would i assume the norm being that JB's be secured, and the wires made into them before being stripped?

Yes, the box should be secured and the cable sheath should extend into the j-box. These boxes are designed to take up to four cables.

The white j-box pictured elsewhere shows how it should be done (if I do say so myself... ).

[Edit] Pic copied from other thread:





[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 07-21-2002).]

ah...much better!

Hey that reminds me of a J.B. I took out of a celing in a mobile home. They uncovered it for me because he knew it was there.It was burnt looking outside of box. I soon discovered they had joined a peice of copper wire to aluminum. I politely told him he was lucky to be able to call me.
if a fire had started in the middle of night. He was saved because he didn't forget the cover on the J.B.

[This message has been edited by poppa Bill (edited 07-22-2002).]

I've found plenty of these j-boxes buried in walls as well. People seemed to find the darndest places to hide them!

The problem of aluminum (or aluminium as it's called over here) wire is something we've largely avoided, as it never caught on for smaller cables in domestic use.


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 07-23-2002).]

Paul,
Just a short note on aluminium wiring,
I was recently talking to a sparkie who done
his time in the UK during the 1960's and he reckoned that someone over there must have had an aluminium fetish, as he was saying that all of the cables, conduit and a few other things were all manufactured from good
old Al,is some of this wiring still found in older installations?,the aluminium conduit must have been a shocker to work with, ever tried to straighten a bent length
of aluminium?.

Termination characteristics of aluminium conductors have been improved with "8000-series" alloy compounded with a small amount of iron. The alloy is almost universal for inside [building] wiring left of the pond, but not used much in utility [site] applications. Part of the reason for that is that utilities typically use 100% hydraulic-compressed terminations and splices, which are as close to bulletproof as can be had. OTOH, for inside wiring in the US, setscrew-type terminations are unfortunately still quite common, and are truly P-O-S items, regardless of the insistence of many connector salesmen. Sadly, after 50 years, the politics of building codes still do not prohibit them.

As for raceway, I used to work in a winery that used 110% threaded-rigid aluminum conduit. Its coefficient of expansion is so great that straight runs firmly secured on pipe racks would "snake" quite noticeably [or tear itself apart] during temperature extremes.

Here we don't use j-boxes in new, residential installations, when the wires are built IN the walls. Whenever we do use them (industrial instal, garages, cellars), then they have 2 b accessible.
We wire from one switch to the other with L,N & PE.
Our J-boxes are much more user friendly.
I find the whole british system very unatractive for electricians to work with. Here we have much better material and more user-friendly.

Belgian,
I agree that some of the ways we have over here in England leave a lot to be desired, but it could be worse, they could start regulation on who can install electrical equipement ( I wish )
some of our practices might appear to be a bit odd, but as an electrician of a few years i dont see them as ( until i joined ECN that is )
Pauluk mate,
are you originally from Blighty or are you still here, and why ?

John H

I guess that to anyone who's grown up with a certain system, any other foreign ways seem strange at first. But, yes, Britain is rather the odd man out on some things -- Fused plugs, ring circuits, etc. (I was going to add driving on the left, but then more places than you might think do that, including, I believe, the U.S. Virgin Islands!)

John,
I'm on the Norfolk coast at the moment, but I've lived in various places around England, spent time working out in the States (Nebraska), and I'm still thinking about expatriating again to somewhere with cheaper housing and better weather!

Paul,
I also remember the same sparkie mentioning
a wiring system used in the UK,around the
1960's, he called it the Octopus, it was
used in housing developments where every house was the same, but he said that the down-fall of this system was if the labels had been removed from the wires.
It featured a large junction box up in the
roof void, and everything was taken from there.
Have you ever seen one of these systems, in any of the houses you have worked in.

Trumpy,
I've seen "Octopus" wiring once, at least I think that was what it was.
The house was built in 1960 and when I rewired it (1999) I found a large metal JB under the 1st floor landing with power & lighting cables in it. The cables were TRS (tough rubber sheathed), lighting cables unearthed, as was common in that era.
Cables (labelled) radiated from this box to each switch & light on the ground floor, also to power points on 1st floor (I think that corrupted the ring main, but i'm not going down that thread again!) , bathroom heater & shaver point.
The real shocker was you needed to pull 3 fuses to isolate this JB.
Not a great system in my opinion.

Incidentally in this part of the world, when we use a JB system for lighting (normally only on rewires nowadays) we tend to take most of the cables for each circuit to 1 central adaptable box. Individual JB's for each light & switch are not the norm.

Yes, David, that is the Octopus system, complete with TRS cables, glad that they do
not use wiring systems like that anymore.
I have come across some systems like this
over in New Zealand here, but this can be attributed more to DIY work than a standard system.

I can't say I've ever come across the "Octopus" system, but then most of the houses I work on in this area are not the types that are likely to have been fitted with it.