Yesterday I took pics of two classic Austrian Diazed panels. They originally date to the mid-1950ies and obviously have been updated several times. I found them at some rooms rented by a local church (a friend of mine had a Halloween party there and I had nothing better to do than look into the fuse boxes...)



Big panel, supplying stage and room lighting. The vertical columns are R - N - S - N - T - N, so single phase circuits can be split over the phases. The bottom 2 rows are 2 3ph circuits that don't have a fused neutral. The box on the bottom right is an RCD. The left switch is labeled stage lighting. At the very bottom they added 2 modern surface-mount MCB panels. The right one obviously contains a 3ph + N breaker, an RCD, a 1p + N breaker, another RCD and another 1p+N breaker.



The smaller and messier of the 2 panels. The top row seems to be the main fuses (they're 35A Diazed III size). The center row are 3 single phase circuits. At the bottom there's the breaker controlling the 380V Perilex receptacle (top right), the main switch for hall and stage and the RCD.
At the bottom of the box you've got the usual mess of replacement fuses, though I'd never stack up that many replacements. Besides I don't have the slightest idea what they'd use the 16A fuses for, since there are only 10A circuits there.

Note: This is also a test post whether my new web space supports hotlinking. If it doesn't I'll have to try something else.
Obviously it doesn't. I'll have to mail them to Paul.

[This message has been edited by Texas_Ranger (edited 11-01-2003).]

{ Images now on ECN's server -- Paul }

[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 11-01-2003).]

Edited to correct phase designations in description of pix #1

[This message has been edited by Texas_Ranger (edited 03-10-2004).]

looks really messy. Normally here even a panel of that era would be fully enclosed. i.e. all of the diazed units would be mounted on similar rails but with only the fuse caps visible. the wiring would be behind a grounded metal panel.

No, thats typical for panels like these. Nowadays code requires a front cover, it's usually a makeshift plate of acrylic glass that's just mounted in front of this arrangement. Usually those covers disappear pretty quickly after the PoCo guys have checked on the wiring and put their seal on the meter. Also it's a pretty recent requirement, I think it came into action with the ETV 98.
I've never seen a grounded panel door before either, and it doesn't seem to be required for changes. We didn't ground our metal meter enclosure and neither the electrician nor the PoCo had any objections.
Also note that the panel doesn't have a back wall. It's a plaster wall!

Ranger, i saw small red X at the first page load.
then i copied the links into the browsers adress bar, worked.
then reloaded the forums page, also worked.

are there no more covers on the whole panels? or are these removed?
the second one, seems like the grounding was installed not so long ago. But messy again, i cant see any paint removed where the wire is bonded to the gray panel border!

my thaughts about -

is "bungle" the english word?


-edit: now the pics are gone again but the borders have the real size of the pics. when i right-click "show picture" the pics appear. strange thing...


[This message has been edited by :andy: (edited 11-01-2003).]

There's no reason to scrape any paint. In most cases the ground bus bar sits on a plastic base.
No that's what it looks like when you open the panel door in order to replace or unscrew a fuse. In this case you even have to open it to switch off the lighting.
The guys who installed this definitely didn't do the nicest of work, but that's the usual sight here. If those things are completely rewired or are completely unchanged they usually look neat, the wires are bent nicely and strapped together with cable ties for each circuit. In this case the way the ground wire for the door is installed makes my hair curl. Not exactly dangerous, but looks really awful. Sevicing such a panel is close to impossible because the wires of all those circuits are just a big mess. And if you fumble behind the elements there's a (though faint) risk to touch the live 230V terminals.
Bungle is correct according to my Langenscheidt, but bodge seems to be more common.
Unfortunately there are very few electricians who really do wquality work, especially on rewires they tend to adjust the quality of their work to that of the original wiring. For example when we had a local company rewire half an apartment I caught a sparky making 220V joints by twisting and taping the wires. His journeyman saw that and told him: "hey you can't do that!" His answer: "But why? It was like that before!"
When our school got entirely new wiring they had to rip out everything and redo it over the summer holidays 'cause nothing worked!
I've seen real scary work done by pros here. Wires running in circles, nails hammered right through the phase conductor of NYIF (flat cable for use in walls, usually secured by driving small nails in the (rather wide) gaps between the individual conductors, that stuff looks like zip cord but much wider with about 2mm between the conductors), strip connectors (Lusterklemmen) buried in plaster, Schuko receptacles fed with 0,75mm2 wire fused 16A slow-blow,...
I sometimes have the feeling some pros here are worse than DIYers, or at least as bad. Get me right: Not all pros are that sub-standard, but of the 4 electricians in my area of the city I know of at least one he's previously done _very_ substandard work. Anyway, he has retired now, but I could still kill him for hooking up 1mm2 wires to a Schuko socket to a 16A MCB. We ran some pretty heavy stuff off of that until I got suspicious because a lamp connected to the same socket almost went out each time I switched on the computer.
Oh yeah, and we originally called them because we wanted a clean new supply to 2 of the rooms, right from the panel. Several years later I ripped up some walls near the panel and discovered both circuits supplying the apartment were stil about half the way old cloth-covered 1mm2 wires w/o ground. They just ran 4mm2 ground wires stapled to the walls and told us everything was fine.

Ranger, the paint scraping i mentioned was not meant for the bus bar, but for the cable shoe with the yellow insulation right over it thats bonded to the outer border. this looks just like mounted on paint. perhaps it will give contact, but not well.

great you mentioned that electricians adjust their style of work to the existing installations. thats what they did when replacing our central heating and the electrics for it 10 years ago. if i had my actual knowledge back then, i would have told them something.

i just made a list of faults they did, some nice examples:

-Used green-yellow conductor as phase. NO-NO
-Placed strip connector in light fixture above bulb. connector melted and plastic dropped on lamp, bare terminals over it.
-loaded 16A circuit with ocassionally 21+A (3 phase 8A water heater + 13A Washing machine + all cellar lights additional on 1 of these phases. Fused by diazed which gets warm but doesnt trip in this condition.
-Junctioned circuits of 2 different meters and panels in one junction box
-No Ground connection on grounding conductor in parts of the cellar (wondered why my phase testers neon lamp lit when touching the ground wire!!)

and a few more...

[This message has been edited by :andy: (edited 11-01-2003).]

Thanks Paul for fixing the images!
You mean where the ground wire is screwed to the door (far right of the picture)? I think the bolt is an integral part of the door, so there's no need for a good connection between door and connector, only between connector and bolt.

Local village and church halls are quite a source of amusement for wiring!

No dized fuses here, but in many other respects this mass of wiring looks very reminiscent of some British systems where extra fuseboards have been added over the years. At least this lot has a cabinet round it all.

What's that hand-written note at the bottom left of the second picture say? It looks like somebody is asking "Please don't...." something-or-other.

It reads: "Please _never_ turn off this switch!"
The label stuck over the 4 fuses in the first pic reads "Out of service!". Since the left fuse under the label is labeled "Chandelier" probably the hall lighting doesn't work (yesterday we only had wall sconces with colored bulbs and some dim backstage lighting).
The Grounding in panel #2 was definitely added later on, you can see the main ground wire coming in in that light grey conduit at the bottom left of the picture.
I also have a pic of the connection of the hot water heater. A Pice of NYM coming out of the wall, a piece of flex coming out of the heater (100l wall-mount type, usually 2000W, 230V) joined with strip connectors and lazily wrapped with some tape. I'll post that one tomorrow. BTW, if you're interested in close-ups of one or another part of the pictures I can do that quite easily, I had to downsize them heavily for posting them here (They were HQ 56x44cm or something like that and I downsized them to 18x13).

ranger, I thaught that the bolt was welded to the door or something. with the paint i meant this place:


and whats that (brass?) piece on the bar right of the big diazeds?

[This message has been edited by :andy: (edited 11-01-2003).]

Oh, now I know what you mean. Completely overlooked that one. Yeah, that definitely isn't the most elegant of solutions.
That brass thing is the neutral connector block. A single phase circuit would have a second Diazed fuse instead of that block. In this type of fuse box there's no neutral bus bar, the neutral is a bus just like the phases, and depending on whether it's a 1ph or 3ph circuit there's a fuse or such a block in that position. The 2 3ph circuits in the bigger panel also have them.

why was the neutral fused?? is this just for extra safety or are there other reasons?

The fused neutral thing started in the DC days, I think it was just for extra safety (the system was 220-0-220V 3wire Edison DC, i.e. +, - and neutral). Later on it turned out to be pretty handy when almost all of Vienna was converted to 3x220V AC (127/220V wye w/o neutral, i.e. you had just normal ungrounded recetacles but with 2 hots instead of hot and neutral), naturally requiring both phases to be fused. Today fused neutrals are pretty uncommon, but 1P + N breakers are still about the only type of brekaers used here. (They fuse the hot and switch the neutral).
As you can see, the Perilex 3-phase socket is fused with three individual breakers. This is not too common but perfectly legal here. If fuses were employed it would be impossible to link the three OCODs, so they don't see a problem with MCBs either.

I've never seen anything like it. All Swedish diazed panels have - and have always had - a metal cover. The design is also slightly simpler. (Kent posted a few pictures a year or two ago in this thread) I've only seen porcelain fuseblocks like this on 1930's panels. (But with a metal cover around them)

Irish regulations are pretty specific about never ever ever absolutely never under no circumstances don't even think about fusing a neutral even where the live is also fused.

They like the idea of power being completely cut if there is any kind of overload.

----

Here's the promised pic of some other wiring in that place.
This is how the 100l hot water heater is wired:



Actually it should have a Schuko socket or flushbox with approved blank plate with strain relief.

And the plumbing isn't the most recent either.



Those open-vent gas water heaters used to be very common here, but become increasingly rare. At least this one isn't built into a tiny closet like the one I've seen in another church hall. (They stuck a note onto the door saying: "Do not operate while doors are closed!", but the pilot flame was on all the time.
BTW, the heater in the pic definitely needs a checkup, the pilot flame is at least twice as big as it should be.

Very scary!

Ranger,
You paint a very grim picture of Austrian electrical installations.
I don't like the panel without cover, it would be easy for someone to accidentally put their fingers into the back.
I have to agree with djk's comments on fusing the neutral, this has been prohibited in the UK for over 50 years. It would be acceptable to install a multi-pole linked breaker that also breaks the associated phase(s), but that is almost non-existent here.
As for the water heater connection, how could anyone leave such a bodge where it is accessible to members of the public, even if it was just a temporary connection.

2 pole/ Multipole MCBs are certainly allowed here as they trip everything out simultaniously. A fused neutral would leave half the circuit live.

Multipole MCBs are generally not used in domestic installations though they only really crop up in systems where 3-phase is in use.

"one out all out" RCD and over current protection's compulsary in 3-phase. Older systems would have had 3 diazed fuses.
---

I will be much more careful of what i touch in austria if i visit! :P


[This message has been edited by djk (edited 11-03-2003).]

The water heater connection is certainly a little less than ideal (<- That's British understatement! ).

It's acceptable here to use a breaker which opens the neutral simultaneously with all phases, but very rare to actually see that done in practice. Isolation switches for water heaters and similar fixed appliances are double-pole, however.

Fused neutrals were common in 1930s wiring. My grandparents house in London still had some of this in the 1970s. They also had an Ascot gas water heater over the kitchen sink, very similar to the one in Ranger's photo.

Well, if the wiring looks ok right from the beginning it's probably safe as long as you don't start messing around. Accidents are pretty rare, in spite of the obviously bad state of some of the wiring. Besides: As long as they're dry plaster walls insulate pretty good. We had some bare wires inside the plaster yet didn't get more than 6V on the wall surface.
The panels aren'T that bad, it's pretty hard to stick your finger inside of that. You'd have to bend y<our finger all the way round like an oldfashioned umbrella handle and touch the terminals from the back. Besides they require a cover to be fitted whenever such a panel is altered. Depending on the quality of the mounting they last quite long to only a few days (the ones were the screws fall into the plaster chunks on the floor and immediately disappear once you take them off the first time, after you got new screws you notice the threads have worn out and dump the entire cover). I've seen 2 of them so far. one was pretty solid work, green translucent acrylic glass with round holes for each fuse. Only problem with all of those covers and the main reason why I "accidentally" "forget" them is you have to unscrew _all_ fuses before putting them on again. Imagine an apartment building, 6 apartments on one floor, supplied by one main fuse box like this. Now try telling all the tenants you gotta kill their power twice because you'va got to retighten the screws on you main fuses...
Besides I actually like being able to see right into the panel when opening the door. I wouldn't ever have been able to take pictures like these... and after all I'm an electrical maniac like most of us who cares more for the wiring of a place than for anything else...
We still have the tiny version of something like this, that is a 4 space + RCD breaker panel and above a small Diazed panel with only 2 circuits (it's an almost square thing that sits on porcelaine insulators screwed to the wall surface. Atop of it I put a box of replacement fuses.

O yeah, regarding the gas water heater: it's the almost legendary Vaillant Geyser type. I think a modern version of it is still made.

Is that the correct spelling, or a typo?

There's a make in Britain named Valiant.

Vaillant is a German company with a long tradition of producing heating systems and components. www.vaillant.de


The company was founded as a simple plumbing company in 1874.



In 1894 Johann Vaillant invented his first gas water heater. In 1904 he invented a heater called Geyser, which was with several modifications built until at least 1970. Maybe the name still exists.

The house where I live was built in 1913-1914 and all seven bathrooms were equipped with such water heaters right from the beginning, judging by the still original gas lines and mounting brackets. Pretty fancy, back in those days most new apartments didn't even have running water inside, only a sink in the hallway and a shared toilet on each floor. We think the house was built as cheap upper-class apartments, built to make as much money as possible. From the distance everything looks very luxurious but as soon as you take a closer look it's shoddy. Cheap parquet (long and wide boards were much more expensive, we have formats from 3.5x25 to 5.5x25 cm, large ones were 6x60 or even larger), thin walls, ... but electrical wiring in all rooms, seperate toilet and bathroom,...

Edited to remove unnecessary pic.

[This message has been edited by Texas_Ranger (edited 11-05-2003).]

Here's a pic of an old style Austrian breaker panel for comparison. The breakers were much higher than modern ones and the RCD is only 100mA, illegal nowadays (I was even told the entire panel would be illegal).



Hope this image works, I finally managed to gain access to my university web space, I guess it should support hot linking. If not I'll give up.

it works

i didnt think that they were din rail appliances with more height that 45mm.

Old Breakers in Germany were just higher from the rail (the distance rail - panelfront was bigger), and they were 2 Units wide for just one pole.

Those were 80mm. The distance DIN-rail-panel front was the same as with new ones. This type of breaker was used until some time between 1987 and 1991 (2 rewires I've seen, the 1987 rewire still has the old ones, the 1991 rewire already has the smaller type). Width was always the same, only the RCDs have gotten narrower, putting a new RCD into such a panel leaves almost enough space to fit a single pole breaker. 1p + N or 2p breakers are double width. I actually like the old ones better because the handles are bigger. When we had an electrician to check our wiring after we relocated the meter he looked at our panel and said: "Those Diazed fuses aren't gonna stay?" We just said: "No. they're just temporary." Then he said: "Don't let the PoCo guys see that panel. The breakers aren't legal any more either." I didn't ask for reasons, so I have no idea why you can't use them. They're pretty expensive at Ebay, since there are no replacements any more. Though I don't have the slightest idea why anyone would buy a whole panel like the one in the picture (I took it from Ebay), except for a nostalgia nut like me

They may or many not react according to the standardised Cenelec and EN rules. So would be outlawed.

MCBs are pretty much identical around europe thesedays. With the exception of the UK's ring circuits the differences in installations around europe are becoming smaller and smaller all the time.

to get the old thread back up, i made some pics today of a recently installed panel (big panel) to show how it might look these days...


Cabinet



left side opened. left: Main breaker, must be capable to shut down the unit even in case of a total short. Middle: Breakers for lights, small machines, Schuko receptacles etc, right yellow sticker: Overvoltage protectors, bottom: 3.phase Neozed fuse units, can take 2 to 63A fuses.


inside. the terminals in the back are the outlets from the Diazed fuses (nothing connected yet), the Neutral is shared by the copper bar, the Ground is shared via the Din rail (green-yellow terminals feet make electrical contact to it).



Connections from the breakers. again N shared via copper bar and PE via din rail.


Power disconnectors, these can hold NH size fuses up to i think 200A? not sure, there are 4 different dimension types of them.


electronic relays controlling the lights via EIB (European installation bus).


switches for the lights with white LEDs


[This message has been edited by :andy: (edited 12-02-2003).]

Cables to the lights coming in. Recognize the new gray color for third phase.



again nice bundle work in the lights cabinet



hope anyone is interested to see this

have a nice day

Wow, that's a huge beast. The largest panel I've ever seen was at a school, don't know the age, but it was about 1x2m. The wiring inside was new but a mess. I remember arm-thick bundles of black and blue wires all over the panel, no chance to figure out what belonged where. i think the breakers weren't even labeled. _That_ was ugly! In those old Diazed panels you still have a chance to trace all wires to the respective fuses without tearing apart the panel. At another (newer) school they did better and split it up into amazing numbers of subpanels, all breakers labeled with laser printer. The wiring wasn't much better though, each time it snowed the RCD feeding the receptacles in our classroom would trip. It didn't mind rain at all, but snow somehow got it. Well, after the story... they had to tear out _all_ wiring and redo it because _nothing_ worked! Luckily they used generous amounts of trunking, so at least they didn't have to tear up all walls.

well, luckily most of these units here are made comprehensibly and well marked. you can see they labeled every clamp. The breaker labels on the front plates are even engraved.
and nearly every unit like these carries a map or book with all schematics on the inside of the door.

Nice pictures Andy!

I borrowed a digital camera today and played around with. As you will see, I need to practice. Unfortunately, I ran out of batteries... And at the moment I haven't any photo editing software in the computer to resize and sharpen the photos. The photos are directly from the camera. Large files.

The new panel for a lunchroom. Ongoing work.

Upper part of the same panel. Terribly blurred picture

The main panel, ca 1948 with some bits and pieces replaced or added later.

The old cloth covered cables for the old panel. Common way of placing cables now and then.

Nice pictures guys -- Thanks!

@ C-H

are there heavy loads connected to that panel, or do you use diazed fuses as standard instead of breakers?

No heavy loads. Most of it's 10A circuits, with some 16A circuits for the kitchen. I think the electricians are simply a bit conservative and don't trust MCB's.

thats why its prescribed here to have at least one melting fuse system in your house (normally 50 or 63A). this doesnt save from small overloads, but sure blows if theres a short and MCBs should stick (has anyone ever seen or heard of a MCB that stuck due to contact arcs?)

It's standard practice in Britain for the main service fuse(s) to be the cartridge type. Their higher rupturing capacity provides the necessary protection when the prospective short-circuit current is higher than the MCBs can handle.

As for breakers not tripping and opening properly, just ask our American friends about Federal Pacific!

It's still normal practice (here in Ireland anyway)to include a neozed fuse, typically 63A on a standard distribution panel.

ESB owned equipment:
<Service Fuse 80 Amps>----<Meter>---Isolating switch
Consumer owned equipment:
<Main switch on board>----<Main fuse e.g. 50 or 63A>---30mA RCD---MCBs

[This message has been edited by djk (edited 12-06-2003).]

here are even 2 fuses used.

Main Line connection - 50/63A NH - 35A Neozed before meter - RCD - MCBs

Doesn't having a Neozed before the meter make it easy to bypass the metering completely?

It's occasionally done, but not very often. Here in our old apartment building you usually have 3 60A NH fuses in an enclosure outside the building and a set of 2 or 3 Diazed fuses for each apartment (usually located inside a fuse box on each floor) ahead of the meter. The wiring from the fuses to the meter is not to be spliced, though _no one_ checks on that. Most hacks involve cutting into those wires somewhere during the run of the old cardboard conduit, splicing into them and replastering the area. if you do the plaster job well enough it'll never show until somebody decides to replace the feeder. It's not even dangerous since you can easily unscrew the fuses (they've got to be accessible, with today's power requirements those 20 or 25A fuses blow from time to time). overcurrent protection is a bit of an issue since your 1.5mm2 wire will only be protected by a 20 or 25A fuse. And installing another set of fuses would raise some suspicion I guess!

The main fuses are ahead of the meter in Sweden. People sometimes smash the glass, put wires in the fuse holder and then pick up a neutral somewhere else.

The problem really is the fact that the meter is located at the customers premises. In my humble opinion, it should be somewhere else where people can't tamper with it.

The irish system has a sealed service fuse that you can't remove without breaking a very large sealed tag which is very visible everytime the meter's read. It's also why the ESB requires all of the cables to be visible on the board where the meter's mounted rather than hidden behind it. The meter reader's supposed to visually inspect the installation to make sure that all of the seals are intact and that only 2 cables enter and leave the meter.

However, people did get around meters the most common trick in the old days was to remove the screws that held the wooden panel that meter was mounted on and tilt it over to about 45 degrees. The old meters couldn't work if they wern't completely level so would stop counting units. I've also heard of tricks with magnets etc. used to disrupt the metering

They simply started sealing the board making it impossible to remove without breaking very obvious seals.

Group meters can sometimes be used to verify the accuracy of customer meters by metering the entire supply to a number of premises and if someone's really suspected of fraud they can even install a pole-mounted meter to gather evidence.

I once thought of using the screw trick in order to relocate the meter w/o having to dump the cool old wooden meter board. However, the wiring was in such a bad shape I decided to do the job right.
A common way to stall meters was to drill a hole through the disc and push a wire (paper clip, ect) through the disc. Only problem: the meter readers weren't that dumb they didn't notice the hole in the meter...
Modern meter bases have three mounting screws, one opf which is hidden benath the meter's terminal cover. Impossible to get such a meter off the wall, unless you try ripping the anchors out of the brick wall, hoping the sparky who installed it drilled into a mortar joint and didn't bother using moltofill. Even some of the old wooden boards simply got a new hole drilled. I still have two of the real old boards lying around, the electricians just dump them when taking them out.

BTW, some of these (or even most residential ones) weren't flush like the ones in the pics but screwed to the wall on 2cm porcelaine distance blocks. Most people built a custom cabinet around it, but not all. Sometimes you'll still come into an apartment and see in the hallway a meter on a wooden board and below or above 2-4 10A Diazed fuses. Upgrading those panels usually means taking down the old Diazed panel and replacing it with a surface-mount DIN rail one.