I've seen the sub-panel system like this on several rambling old Victorian houses in this area.

The layout wouldn't have been designed that way from the outset. It's just that the places have had wiring extended over the years and with the solid brick wall construction a single big sub-feeder to a particular area was probably the easiest way to do it.

One house I worked on a couple of years back in Cromer had an assortment of "fuse boxes" all over the house. It was a huge Victorian house that had been used as a guest-house in more recent times. I kept finding small panels tucked away all over the place, some fairly new, others dating back to the 1930s.

You can do quite a bit of detective work in these places and trace what must have been done. In a cupboard under the stairs was a small 4-way fuse panel below which I found the chopped off remains of what had obviously been the original service to the house. The "new" service entered in an extension which had been built at the rear, and this old 4-way panel had then just had a sub-feed run in from the new position.

At that "new" service entrance, extra circuits had clearly been added piecemeal over the years. There were no less than four separate 4-way panels there, and they were all daisychained! When somebody needed extra circuits, they had obviously just fitted another 4-way panel and then used an existing branch fuse as the sub-feed for it. Move the original circuit from that fuse onto the new panel, and "Voila!" Three extra spare fuse positions! [Linked Image]

There were 13A sockets and even a whole panel, if I recall correctly, run on 5A fuses! Some outlets must have run through about 6 or 8 daisychained panels!

The distribution was an absolute mess. In the end I got it down to a main panel at the service entrance, a sub-panel under the stairs for the downstaits and another sub-panel for the upstairs section.


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 05-20-2003).]