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#139303 11/01/03 12:58 PM
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 2,498
T
Member
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...)

[Linked Image]

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.

[Linked Image]

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).]

#139304 11/01/03 01:10 PM
Joined: Dec 2002
Posts: 1,253
D
djk Offline
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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.

#139305 11/01/03 01:32 PM
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 2,498
T
Member
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!

#139306 11/01/03 03:43 PM
Joined: Oct 2003
Posts: 289
:
Member
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 - [Linked Image from 320036920636.bei.t-online.de]

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).]

#139307 11/01/03 04:09 PM
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 2,498
T
Member
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.

#139308 11/01/03 06:00 PM
Joined: Oct 2003
Posts: 289
:
Member
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).]

#139309 11/01/03 06:06 PM
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 2,498
T
Member
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.

#139310 11/01/03 06:37 PM
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 7,520
P
Member
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.

#139311 11/01/03 07:16 PM
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 2,498
T
Member
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).

#139312 11/01/03 07:38 PM
Joined: Oct 2003
Posts: 289
:
Member
ranger, I thaught that the bolt was welded to the door or something. with the paint i meant this place:
[Linked Image from 320036920636.bei.t-online.de]

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

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

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