This is an empty pad at the nearby mobile-home holiday park. The circuit breaker is off, but would you be happy with the feeder just cut off and taped like this, within easy reach of children and animals?

Uhh, no!

Ian A.

Not just the tape job, (what kind of tape is that??) but the lack protection for those underground cables. Should be in a RMC or PVC conduit.

It's regular PVC electrical tape, green/yellow stripes (the modern colors for ground connections here).

The underground cables are armored, and are actually suitable for direct burial:

I hate that type of cable. I found that terminating the ends with those brass connectors really sucked. Very time consuming. Heavy duty stuff but it sucked doing terminations.

We use armoured cable for most applications in our factory. Steel conduit is just too time consuming, it all has to be threaded and screwed together. As with most things, once you are used to it, it only takes minutes to make off.

Interesting! Never seen the stuff before. I can see your point also Johno12345, so true. Is anyone else ever seen or used this type of cable before?

SWA (steel wire armored) cable seems to be particular to the UK and UK influenced countries. Years ago there was a lot of talk about that stuff here.

Sat lurking here for ages and finally got round to registering. Be gentle with me as I am a UK spark [35+years] but don't understand half of the USA terms used on here, sorry.
Anyway, 3 swa's into a 4" box [could even be 3"], nice job! Bet it is a sight inside the box with all its rust. Hate to say it but fairly typical of Mobile home parks. The ones that we used to work on were dissed [water and elec] by the shifters and the soil pipe removed by virtue of the flat-back driving off site and pulling the pipe out of the ground so that any residual contents could 'self drain'...mmmm nice!

Either there's a whole lot of tape there or they at least used choc blocks on the wires. The outline does look familiar.
And I don#t know about the UK green/yellow tape, but any Austrian and German I've seen so far is far inferior to all other colors and will come off even faster than regular tape would in such an environment.

More pertinent, wrapping it in Earth tape implies to any passing ignoramus that all the wires inside are safe to touch.

Here are the glands, for those not familiar. First pic shows the 2-part types for internal work; second is the 3-part gland which has an extra nut with seal for external use:





They're not too bad once you get used to them, but you do sometimes get comments along the lines of "I thought you were doing wiring, not plumbing!"

Yes! The various colored tapes seem to be less "sticky" in general than black, but I've noticed that green/yellow is particularly prone to this problem.

Trimix,

Welcome to the forum! Whereabouts in Blighty are you located?

Don't worry about the terminology; our American cousins have trouble with ours as well.

As you might have guessed from the prevalent rust, this is right by the sea.

There are some more pics from the same site in this thread:

https://www.electrical-contractor.net/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000518.html



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 02-05-2007).]

The yellow/green tape here is also much stiffer than the other colors, for whatever reason.
I have to admit I never really used that stuff since I don't think it's a code requirement, so I don't even bother carrying around more than one color.