Just took my sunglasses off after my recent trip I won't tell you the country, though.
(A little challenge there...)

I took a lot of photos, some of them "electrical". I had bought a $100 digital camera which worked very well apart from the fact that it wouldn't work in anything but very good light. Most electrical photos were simply too bad to be useful. Oh, well, what did I expect?

Here is a panel with electrical meter in a private home. Diazed fuses, with what appeared to be 16A fuses throughout. The wires are 1.5 mm2, mainly in NYM style cable or orange flexible conduit (16 or 20 mm dia). Color code in all installations appear to be the "old" European. (Blue, Black, Brown, Black) This was the only panel I found without an RCD. All others, even old ones, had an 500 mA RCD.

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Here is a supply entry cabinet. (I honestly don't know what to call it) The supply cable comes in from the bottom. Found in the outside of building walls.

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I opened a cabinet in a larger installation to see what was inside: Fuses and a meter

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Below are three pictures of the distribution wiring.

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Pic
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Almost all OH wiring is cabled, but retains the insulators as connectors. Looks funny.

Here is an unusual tap, and two poor pictures of it:

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The cable comes off the service wires to a home and enters the street lighting through a hole cut in the lamp. The lamp works, though.

Next is a warning sign, found on a transformer station.

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This type of switch plate was found outside the bathrooms of private homes. Identical, but the order of the switches was random, though.

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[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 08-08-2005).]

Well C-H,
Fine pics you have there!.
I can't say that I can even throw a wild guess at where these pics where taken.
Would I be close by saying Poland?.
I would loosely call it an Intake Box.
In pic #4, I can't help but think that that is a UHF TV Aerial attached to that streetlamp to the right of the picture?.
In the bottom pic, what is the switch on the left for?.


[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 08-08-2005).]

Not Poland, but you are in Eastern Europe...

The switches in the bottom pic are:

Hot water cylinder - Light - Space heater

The heater looks just on the switch: Simply a bare element with a reflector behind it. About 1000W. (Dang! I didn't think of taking a pic of it.) The nameplate had a manufacturing date of 1986 stamped on it.

I'm thinking either Hungary or Czechkoslovakia (yeah, I know it's two separate countries now ).

Further south? Croatia?
Alan

I often wonder when I see mains distribution along walls of old buildings like that...how rampant are unauthorised (unmetered) tap offs?
Sometimes in areas like this it looks like you can just reach out a convenient window and help yourself to whatever phase takes your fancy! And as for taking your domestic supply from the nearest streetlamp...well it looks like no one would even care, let alone notice.

I think the real question to ask is, how far will C-H travel for a vacation?
Claus, did it involve a plane ride?.

Yup, plane and bus. Alan is almost on it... One step south / southeast...

I suppose Yugoslavia.

[This message has been edited by Gloria (edited 08-09-2005).]

Right on! Serbia-Montenegro.

Good on ya Gloria!.
How was the weather there Claus?.
It looked to be pretty good.
Other side of the coin, how was the food?.

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 08-09-2005).]

The weather? Between 35 - 39C and clear skies.

The food? Excellent, especially the fish. Restaurants are abundant and food is generally cheap. So is alcohol. (Petrol, though, is just over €1/litre)

Pizza and hamburgers are very popular fast food dishes, both of which are made in local versions. As you can imagine, hamburgers (€ 2) or pizza slices (€ 1) bought at the streetside can be of varying quality.

There was much less candy on sale than at home but various candy-like biscuits fill the shelves of the local "super"-markets. No bigger than kiosks at home, theses are often open 06-24 or even 0-24.

[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 08-09-2005).]

Interesting photos. A lot of TV travel shows here are promoting this part of the world as a good vacation spot, and even those "relocation" shows are pushing the region as a good place to buy real estate.

Distribution along a facade of terraced buildings seems to be a very common European thing. You see it very occasionally here, but the urban area of Britain all tended to have underground feeds with each building taking its supply separately from under the street.

In pic #6, where do the lines heading off to the lower right from the pole terminate? On a bracket on the house? What's the loose dark-colored line which crosses them at right-angles? It looks as though it comes from the window on the right.

Yes, the wires terminated on a building, probably on insulators. I don't remember.

There were wires going everywhere: The black could be telephone or TV. (Broadband didn't seem to be in use. Even the internet cafés only had dial up connection, despite new computers with a fancy interface designed for internet cafés running on top of Win XP.)

In fact wiring on the facades was almost only found in towns/cities where there was limited space for poles. Elsewhere there were poles with "service drops" similar to the US. These typically looks like a mess. I found this odd, as almost all wiring in buildings and on buldings at street level was neat and tidy.

I have no picture of it, but there are a lot of earth electrodes. These were approx. 2 x 20 mm steel plates that extended into the ground. Either the earth wire was connected directly or connected to a second metal plate, identical to the first. The two metal plates were held together with a clamp (screwed) in an accesible location. The electrode and the conductor was often encased in the facade, but had been brought out at the clamp to allow access/inspection. This would allow you to disconnect the electrode for testing the impedance to earth.

Together with the widespread use of 500 mA RCD's, this indicates that TT earthing is common. However, some of the underground and overhead wiring was 5-wire, with an earth conductor. I found street lights with both green/yellow earth conductor AND earth electrode for each pole. [Sic!]

I couldn't go around opening panels for any number of reasons but found work in progress to look at. I found what appeared to be 10 mm2 five wire (Euro colours) aluminium direct burial cable. (Unarmoured, similar to Swedish N1XV or German NYM-J) I didn't have any good tool to scrape off the oxide layer not a gauge to verify the material and wire size. But I have never seen copper become light grey.

I found NO sockets without earthing, even in old houses. All were Schuko. The only exception were 3-phase sockets, which were of the type described by Ragnar some time ago. (Very similar but not identical to an old Swedish design)

I did go into a supply house to see what was on offer. They did indeed still stock these outlets. I didn't take any photos in the supply house as I have no idea how to explain to the police in Serbian "No sir, I'm not planning a burglary, I'm just investigating the electrical equipment used in this country".