You'll get this in the Sparks forum, and for reasonable reason.. Bodged electrics kill regularly, and it's not always DIY. The guys here don't think that encouraging DIY electrics is a good idea and there are a lot of "oh I just want to buy the gear, my electrician mate will install it" posts
Yeah right.
" so doc, my mate has this itch in.. Uh.. That area.."
I'm the same, always asking for gear advice and I'm sure everyone here thinks I'm DIY sparking my new build. Short of posting up the certificates that my Sparky mate uses to prove he is authorised when working on large sites, there ain't a right lot I can do
For my sins I've picked up a load of BG bear and my spark is happy with it. The RCBOs (twenty of em!) came from
screwfix. Due to a pricing error they ended up about a tenner each. Finding a BG metal clad amendment 3 unit was harder and at 40 quid quite the premium over the 17 quid outgoing no compliant clearance item I could have got from
screwfix. Amusingly the spark then said "what the bloody hell did you buy one of those for?" So all the messing around to get a metal box for the fire to burn away in happily was probably not needed. I could have had two smaller metal CUs but it would have made the install more of a pain in the arse.
Talk to your spark, as he might not believe in amendment 3 yet and it could save you a bit of cash.
Ps in answer to your question, a 5+5 is a split unit, one master switch goes to two RCD, and from there to two banks of MCBs. It's a good idea, means you don't lose all lighting etc if the dodgy cooker trips one RCD. The 10 way one might not have two RCD supplied with it even though it's likely to be the same metal box. It's usually cheaper to by boxes wih RCDs in than get RCDs separately. Be ware also that the number of ways may refer to the number of open slots in the panel and an RCD takes up two slots, so if you buy a 10 way metal box it might not be physically support 10mcbs if you put two rcds in it. Better just to get a fully populated cu (maybe with some spare unused mcb) that has at least the number of mcb you want as it's more economical than buying bits, even if mcb are only pence
Note you kinda need your house wired on some kind of left/right, front/back or "circulation space lighting on different RCD to one most likely to trip due to appliances" split to keep the lights, rather than the traditional up/down (which is a daft idea anyway coz you end up with a downstairs ring final that has every juice hungry appliance on it while the upstairs one has.. A hairdryer occasionally)