ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Are these ring circuits?

IS 401 and IS 401/A seem to have been more concerned with ensuring that BS 1363 plugs sold here conformed to safety standards especially re: sleeved pins.

The old non sleeved type were potentially risky. Know a few ppl who were shocked by them.
They were handy for testing a phase tester though remove plug slightly and contact the Live pin with the phase tester.

Here it's a general consensus that any appliance over 3.5 kW has to be fed with 3ph. In germany there are on-demand water heaters that take 35A/400V, would be pretty hard to connect such a beast to a 1ph supply. Eastern Germany excempts cookers from this rule, they can be wired to a 1ph supply. here in Austria water heaters are either gas or electric storage heaters (rather rare) which run on a dedicated 230V/16A circuit. Cookers are wired up to a 230/400V/3x16A supply. Some ElCheapo cookers come with a Schuko plug, but then the use of rings and oven is limited. In most cases you can remove the jumpers and wire the cooker to 230/400V, then you can use it w/o restrictions.
On board main is used here in single family buildings, 3x Neozed. Appartment buildings typically have the main (= pre-meter) located in the stairway. This has the advantage that you can completely isolate the panel to work on it. However, working inside such an old Diazed main panel isn't too nice. You could cut power at the house main fuses, but that means that all other tenants are without power.
Guess I've to be pretty careful when hooking up our new meter. (We're relocating the meter out to the stairway so the meter reader doesn't have to come into our appartment and the electrician told me just to cut the lead seal, hook up the meter, then he comes and checks the wiring and gets the PoCo to reseal the meter).

Many people in the U.K. are familiar with the old "Baby Belling" stove. It had a couple of rings on top and a small oven/grill and was designed to be portable, plugging into a 13A (or old BS546 15A) outlet. The controls were wired so that it was impossible to turn on any combination of elements which would exceed the 3kW rating of the supply.

DJK,
Here's a pic of an older style unit with the porcelain rewireable fuses. This one is an MEM model, typical 1940s/1950s:



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

I'll e-mail you a pic of the consumer unit in our house complete with 20amp radial MCBs. It's not as complicated as the one I described but almost..

Personally I don't see any problem with the British or Irish approach to wiring a cooker. 3-phase is riskier if something goes wrong and someone contacts two phases. Over here we technically require an electrician to hook up a cooker even to just make the connections from teh wall to the back of the cooker itself and once everything's rated correctly there's never a problem.

I've seen baby bellings here hooked up to 13 amp and 16 amp plugs they don't consume much more than a kettle. Plenty of microwave/grill/oven combination units that use interlocking and cycling to make sure that only one mode of cooking is in use at a time too. If you want all 3 simultaniously you need to pay for a Miele / Gagenau etc and have it hardwired.