A Safer System than having a Service Line fused at 800amp in your house!

[stillp]

I was just going to post something similar Winston! HK has fairly good electrics, but you should see some of the installations in Guanzhou or Wuhan, or even in the suburbs of Beijing! They're rapidly improving, but it'll take a long time to upgrade throughout the country.

What were you working on in Wuhan and Guangzhou? I've worked in both cities myself.

I still abide by my last employer's rule to never post anything that could lead to me being identified, so I won't give any detail, but I was selling control circuit components.

 

[ericmark]

I was in Hong Kong while it was British just before the take over and still know friends who still live there. I am told very little has changed. We did see 15A plugs still in use as well as the 13A and there were sockets which would take either type plug. However it was in the main to British standard.

But I never saw British style semi-detached houses in Hong Kong. Either super expensive mansions or tower blocks there were some old houses out in the country but still not as found in the UK. Even power usage was different it went up in summer and down in winter. Can't really compare both systems.

 

[Echo the husky]

I still abide by my last employer's rule to never post anything that could lead to me being identified, so I won't give any detail, but I was selling control circuit components.

Why? What sort of dodgy gear were you selling?!

 

[stillp]

I still abide by my last employer's rule to never post anything that could lead to me being identified, so I won't give any detail, but I was selling control circuit components.

Why? What sort of dodgy gear were you selling?!

That wasn't the problem, it was the Big Company's marketing communications department, who insisted on vetting everything that could be seen by members of the public.
Funnily enough, one of that was sacked for posting company financials on her Twitter account!

 

[PBC_1966]

I personally feel safer if there was no length of cable in my house, under the floorboards, "protected" by just an 800 amp fuse at the sub-station.

In the great majority of UK homes, little, if any, of that cable (upstream of the local cutout fuse) is actually within the building.

True, but I'm not sure if that's particularly comforting for those installations which are the exception.

Some years ago a neighbor called me to ask if I could go and take a look in his friend's house just around the corner. He was doing a lot of building work, and - obviously without thinking - had installed a whole load of new ceiling joists and left cables hanging below them. Apparently he had then decided that the best solution to that was to notch the lower edge of each joist to fit the cables between joist and new ceiling (yes, I know.....).

Even though he had, supposedly, carefully marked the positions of the cables on the boards, he then managed to put a screw right into a cable. When I got there he showed me what was left of the screw, which, to use his words which I can still remember, "Went with a hell of a bang!" He wanted to know if it was all right to just tape up around the hole in the sheath.

Yes, he'd put the screw dead center into the concentric supply cable, which entered the house at the front and ran what must have been about 20 ft. through the loft and down into a small hallway cupboard where the meter was located.

If I recall correctly, he later told me the DNO charged him around £400. I remember telling him it could have cost him a lot more.

 

[ross94]

Hong Kong Distribution Pillar

• kai
• 5 Feb 2015
• 1

The UK should adopt the system they use in China nowadays, whereby the street mains are terminated in a Distribution Cabinet, containing banks of 100amp service fuses in three rows, one per phase. From this cabinet run the customer service cables, which are of course fused at 100 amps, not the 800 amps we have in the UK, that run to each house in the street, into a dedicated meter box containing a Power Comany Isolator switch - then the Meter - and a Customer Isolator switch, and finally the Consumer Unit, probably a traditional Wylex Standard, but likely to be a din rail box variety in the newest houses.
A much safer system perhaps - the whole service cable being fused at 100 amps.

nowadays they do it that way, well where I live anyway. new estate not far where I live used feeder pillars for each section of the estate. so you still have the 11kv/415v transformer,then from the transformer a main cable runs to each pillar, then the houses are terminated from there. In the pillar there are 3 main fuses per phase, then a row of five or six fuses. 1 row per phase, each fuse will serve about 5 houses each I believe.

 

[PBC_1966]

While we don't have individually fused supplies to each house, the good thing here is that whether overhead or underground, the service is always run in conduit. Here's where the underground service comes into the main panel in our house: