Hi!

I'm Arend from the Netherlands, i'm new to electrical-contractor.net. I like the site and the forums very much, especially the photo forums.

I decided to let you people show how a dutch metering close / breaker box setup looks like. I already saw some other countries setup.

Because the pictures are big i decided to put them on a separate webpage. You can visit them at: www.postbode.org/meterkast

I'm willing to take questions and answer them.

have fun watching.

Grtz,

Arend
The Netherlands

Gidday there, Arend!.
Welcome to ECN.
Wow, our first Electrician from the Netherlands.
What part of the country do you come from?
Those are really good pictures, you posted above.
Mike (Trumpy )

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 05-12-2004).]

Hi there Arend and welcome to ECN

Thanks for taking the time to show us the pics of your meter cupboard, I spent a lot of time in the Netherlands in 99,2000 and like the country a lot, my oldest son has the Euro 2000 football shirt and was the envy of his friends when he got it

I would like to revisit the Netherlands on my next European excursion.

Hope you enjoy your stay at ECN and I look forward to reading more of your posts.

Hi and welcome to ECN!
Most of the pictures look really familiar, except for the sealed fuse box below the meter.
I see you use double-pole breakers too, the Germans only use single-pole breakers and take all neutrals to a neutral bar (btw, ground and earth is the same, what you mean by ground is the neutral wire).
The wire links at the bottom feeding the breakers look pretty familiar too. Not too easy to bend them nice and even...
The breakers were obviously made before introduction of the A/B/C/... rating system, they're L characteristics.

Maybe we could dig out our favorite topic of old international color codes again.
As you might know prior to harmonization about every country used its own wire colors. German.influenced countries used black grey and red (hot, neutral, ground), UK influenced is/was red, black and green,...
Back then we had a real weird and inconsistent text about the old dutch color coding. Can you give us any information on that topic?

Off to personal topics, I've never been to the Netherlands so far, but I've spent many summers with vistors from there, and I really like them. You're funky people! And once I really got to visit Amsterdam and it's tramway museum.

Thanks for your positive replies!

Yes indeed, i confused the ground and neutral wire. Sorry.

Now we have the A (fast trip), B (normal trip), C (delayed trip), D (slow trip) breakers.

Most older breakerboxes use diazed II fuses.

Heavy industrial supply's still use a lot of diazed II or diazed III fuses.

A new mainbreaker is the D40 (sometimes C40) type or 3 times D25.

The breakers in our metering closet are older. As you can see they are labeled 220V, we already have 230V over here (i measure about 226V). an "old" L-breaker acts the same as a B-breaker now does.

As far as i know, we now have

hot = brown
neutral = blue
earth = yellow/green
switchwire = black

and in 3 phase systems: (as of 1 january 2006 !!!)

phase 1 = brown
phase 2 = black
phase 3 = grey

before that time:

phase 1 = brown
phase 2 = black
phase 3 = black with white line


and really old (pre 1970's).

hot = green
neutral = red
earth = grey
switchwire = black

as you can see this is really dangerous, make the hot wire red seems much more safer to me, don't know why they did it this way back then.

in 3 phase systems they used red, yellow, blue (don't know in which order).

Grtz,

Arend

Arend,

Is your neutral bonded to the earth ground at the panel? I have a previous post on Russian wiring with this same question and I wondered how your system is set up.

Thanks,


Robert

The PoCo cable that enters into the PoCo fuse box has a metallic shield, 4 power-wires and 2 control wires.

The metal shield is earth, the 4 wires are: 3 phases and a neutral.

In our home we have our own groun rod. The incoming Neutral and Earth (shield) are connected to eachother and this is our neutral.

So we get Neutral + Phase from the PoCo and the earth from our own ground rod.

Hope this explains it,

Grtz,
Arend

Hi Arend,

Welcome to ECN, and many thanks for the photos.

A few things jump out as seeming quite unusual, as seen from a British perspective.

First, the ground rod actually being driven from inside the house looks very strange. We would normally locate the rod (if used) immediately outside a convenient wall. How long are your ground rods, by the way? It looks as though a fair length of it is not actually in the ground.

Your method of connecting the ground rod to the bar in the distribution panel also looks very odd, as does the section of conductor which zig-zags across the board between two sections of conduit.

There no reason why double-pole breakers (opening neutral as well) cannot be used here, but to do so would be very unusual.

A single-phase 25A service in a modern home is unheard of here. There are a few old 40A services still in use, and I even came across an old 30A service a couple of years ago, but 60 to 100A is the norm for domestic services, with main cables of at least 16 sq. mm. The use of 3-phase with such small service conductors as 4 or 6 sq. mm seems very odd, although similar to many other European countries.

I can see that you have a dedicated branch circuit for a washing machine. I'm guessing that "vaatwassar" is a water heater, but what else is that on circuit #4? Is #5 a dedicated outlet for a microwave oven?

On the color-code issue, here's a link to the long discussion we had about this some time ago: https://www.electrical-contractor.net/ubb/Forum9/HTML/000081.html



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 05-13-2004).]

I am glad my Guys didn't do your cupboard Arend..I would be very pissed at the way the conduits have been installed..uneven bend radii, none symetric saddles, copper showing at the terminals is the worst sin I can see there.

I could carry on, but then standards of work are often a personal thing, and I demand a lot of my Guys due to our clients.

I'll shut up now

Yep have to agree with FWL ,, not the neatest fuse board i have seen,, anyway whats the truncheon in the corner for??

Arend,
I work with an ex-pat Dutch Electrician from Rijswijk(sp?) in Dan Haag, over here in New Zealand, some of the stories he comes out with are real shockers!.

Hi Arend,

Thanks for the great pictures and information. My only comment about your service and junction box is...I can't believe how little space you have for the wires! PaulUK mentioned the same in England.

I install 100-amp services with room for 32 single breakers, and 200-amp services with room for 42 single breakers. Often they are only half-full. The junction boxes I use are 22 cubic inches or 30 cubic inches, and sometimes I assemble them double-deep.

Dave

I have to agree it isn't the neatest setup. The crossing conduits are installed by some guy who did our kitchen 11 years ago.

It wasn't meant to be the most neatest setup ever, it functions and it's safe.. and it also gives an impression of a dutch setup.

Now homes have 40 Amp Single Phase or 25 Amp Three Phase.

40 x 230 = 9.2 kW continous (you can peak to about 12 kW for some minutes)

25 x 3 = 75
75 * 230 = 17.25 kW continous (you can peak the double if slow blow diazed fuses are used).

It's enough here. Central Heating and Hot Water runs on gas. Little hot water supplies for ex. kitchen runs on little boilers that use about 15 W/hour and have a 2 kW heating element (which is about 7 ~ 10 amps).

Oh no, the "kitchen guys" have reached the Netherlands too!.
Watch out!,

Arend,
How long has yellow been used as a colour for Electrical PVC conduit in Holland?.
There was a shocking story of an ex-pat Dutch Electrician in the North Island that cut a yellow pipe thinking it was an isolated conduit and it was in fact High Pressure LP Gas.
Here it is either Grey or Orange.

The yellowish color for conduits are standard here. There is also a gray version which is stronger, but that is mainly used to protect cables, not to run seperate wires trough.

Yellow is also the colour of gas pipes here.

pauluk:

vaatwasser is the dishwasher (3.3 kW)
elektrische ontsteking is the electrical spark to light the gas cooktop.

Today every appliance that is rated above 3000 Watts is required to have it's own circuit. By the time the kitchen is installed this wasn't code yet.

And yes, the microwave is on a seperate outlet. It's a combi-microwave (that's what we call it over here).

Hot air, Microwave and Grill in one "oven". (I think you will get the point ).

Grt,

Arend

I remember the yellowish tone from old conduit installations (1960ies and maybe 70ies). Newer conduit is either light or dark grey, depending on the mechanical rating (light grey means light duty, for use in masonry walls, wood frame walls,..., dark grey means heavy duty for use in cast concrete walls and ceilings). I don't know why, but that yellow flex conduit was really awful to work with because it's really rough inside, so it's almost impossible to pull new wires in an existing conduit.
Exposed gas lines are supposed to be painted a much more intense yellow. Besides, that yellow conduit is thin plastic. A typical gas line is threaded heavy iron pipe, so almost no possibility of mistaking.

The typical PVC electrical conduit sold here comes in either white or black.

If we're looking at "official" color codes though, there is an old British Standard dating back many years which lists certain colors for different services. I can't remember them all, but electrical is orange, gas is yellow, cold water is blue, and I think steam is red. There are all sorts of two-color combinations as well.

Paul

These are the colours that are normally found under the street in Ireland:

electricity: red
gas : yellow
telecom is usually blue. Where it contains fiber it will have lots of warnings and be VERY obvious.
Cable TV uses a different colour duct (varies from network to network)
Plastic Water pipes are normally black

Old duct work's much harder to identify as it was all black/dark colours.

New Zealand uses the following colours for Services:
Electricity U/G): Orange
Electricity above ground): Light Grey
Gas Low Pressure):Light Blue
Gas High Pressure):Yellow
Water: Dark Grey
Telecoms:Green.
Underground Electricity, especially 400V, 11kV and 33kV services are buried direct and have Orange marker tape at half trench depth.

Interesting Arend to see a Dutch installation.
I originally emigrated from NL to New Zealand in 1988 and have worked in my time on a lot of those installations altough mainly with the diazed screw in Weber type fuses.
I see that the MCB's are 2 pole so they switch Phase and Neutral.
In the older srew in fuses panels the On Off switch switched the Phase and Neutral.

I actually use one of the 8 way panels in my downstairs workshop although to be compliant with the MEN system here I only switch the Phase. I can post you a piccie if you want to see it.
What I especially like is the standard colour coding on the fuses. e.g. Green 6 Amps, red 10 Amps etc. I will post a thread regarding this.