ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades UK color-code deadline approaches

PaulUk
In all those light switches I hope you sheethed all the lives and the switch wires in brown sleaving as reqired.
Just to indicate they are live wires and not neurals. And add a bit more confusion

Confusion reigns on the colors now.......

Black is neutral. Or is it phase B? Blue is phase C. Or maybe it's a neutral.

About the only thing you can count on now is that green or green/yellow is earth, and I'm not even sure I'd trust to that anymore.

Paul,

At least the transition to the new colours in Ireland was less of a shock, if you'll pardon the pun.

The ETCI seems to have set it out as :
Blue - neutral
light brown - live (in single phase installs)

3 phase colour schemes here dropped black quite a while ago so it doesn't cause too much confusion.

The only risk is that some European countries seem to be using blue and black rather than blue and brown. I have no idea why!

the phase assignments here are :

Brown - L1
Black - L2
Grey - L3

and Brown *MUST* be L1.. there's no fuzziness about it.

At least we didn't adopt Green White and Orange (irish tricolour flag colours) for 3-phase


[This message has been edited by djk (edited 04-21-2006).]

I never did... it's far too easy to use 3x1.5 cable for wiring a three way switch... just tape the gn/ye... or just leave as is...

Black is a historic thing. Germany always used to have a black #1 phase, whereas Austria had cables with brown # 1 phase. For conduit wiring mostly black was used all around, and that's what I learned, so given the chance I still use black.

White, orange and purple are extensively used for stuff like switched phases, travellers ect. here whereever conduit is used. For example, a stairway lighting circuit: black phase, brown switched phase from timer relay to fixtures and purple wire from push buttons to relay. Blue neutral and ye/gn ground.

Our old system only has three wires, all colors evenly spread, changing from floor to floor (the wiring between the floors is old cloth covered wiring and on each floor they put in some old black-grey-red cable at some point)... no ground of course.

DYI-er, [ as defined by Larry Fine LOL! ];

"Do they make bell-wire to match these turquoise color tiles? I'm fixing up a 3kw electric fire in the shower stall."

Alan

I'm trying to remember the international color-codes thread from a while back without searching right through it. Didn't you change to brown/red/yellow phases so that you could start useing blue as a neutral?


I've seen some European appliances from the 1970s (maybe French and Italian) in the which the appliance cords had black and blue rather than brown and blue (or at least very, very, very dark brown so that it was almost black anyway).

No, but if you use orange "Fire-Glow" tiles instead, the bell wire will soon match it.

Alan, you keep cracking me up!

Older appliance cords seem to be a healthy mix of brown-blue and black-blue. Mostly 70s stuff I think, but might be 80s as well.
Neatest thing is still the cord of my photo print drying press (Made in Italy): red, yellow and green... if I remember correctly green is the phase, red the neutral and yellow the ground...
I also recently found an appliance cord with black, purple and red... purple and red were connected to the pins of the Schuko plug and black was the ground...

Only one color out from matching the flag!

Yeah... but maybe they thought white instead of yellow would be too boring

Tex, it would be confusing for the Italians to match their flag with all three conductors in white.

Alan