I plan (hope) to be erecting a new outbuilding next year, and I will have the luxury of being able to carry out groundworks, part of which will be the laying of two plastic drainage pipes between the house and the outbuilding. one to carry electricity and the other telephone and network cables. Even though the buried electric cable will be in a tough pipe, I'll probably still use SWA cable, partly because I've already got some.
Q1. I've read elsewhere about the problem with terminating SWA cable - if I simply (carefully) remove the armour and sheathing so that I can (a) get to the cores, and (b) connect an earth wire to the armour (using a jubilee clip occurs to me), if I then make the connections to the cable using a junction box and I do that either inside the house/outbuilding, or inside an IP65 box, am I going to have problems?
Q2. (Actually I'm 99.9% certain I know the answer to this). The outbuilding will have an RCD protected CU supplying its circuits, so I want to feed it not from one of the MCBs in my house CU, but instead directly from the service splitter. So the cable run from the house to the outbuilding would have no load or leakage protection, and part of the run would be a length of T/E inside the house to where I join it to the SWA cable. I'm thinking that this is a Bad Idea, and that I should actually have the supply go from the splitter to an RCD switch and then off through the house and into the wild blue yonder. Yesno? And does anybody know where I can get a "standalone" RCD switch (40/50/60A, I guess), i.e. one which does the same as the master switch in a CU but not rail-mounted and without all the CU gubbins?
Q3. Earthing. As I'm also connecting telephone and network cables between the two buildings (15-20m apart) I'm pretty keen to have them at the same earth potential, so the outbuilding earth circuits will be wired back, via the supply cable, to the house earthing point. Would it be a good idea, when the outbuilding goes up, to install an earth rod, and connect to that as well (not instead of) the house earth? This would therefore mean that the single house/outbuilding earth circuit would be physically connected to the earth at two different locations.
Q1. I've read elsewhere about the problem with terminating SWA cable - if I simply (carefully) remove the armour and sheathing so that I can (a) get to the cores, and (b) connect an earth wire to the armour (using a jubilee clip occurs to me), if I then make the connections to the cable using a junction box and I do that either inside the house/outbuilding, or inside an IP65 box, am I going to have problems?
Q2. (Actually I'm 99.9% certain I know the answer to this). The outbuilding will have an RCD protected CU supplying its circuits, so I want to feed it not from one of the MCBs in my house CU, but instead directly from the service splitter. So the cable run from the house to the outbuilding would have no load or leakage protection, and part of the run would be a length of T/E inside the house to where I join it to the SWA cable. I'm thinking that this is a Bad Idea, and that I should actually have the supply go from the splitter to an RCD switch and then off through the house and into the wild blue yonder. Yesno? And does anybody know where I can get a "standalone" RCD switch (40/50/60A, I guess), i.e. one which does the same as the master switch in a CU but not rail-mounted and without all the CU gubbins?
Q3. Earthing. As I'm also connecting telephone and network cables between the two buildings (15-20m apart) I'm pretty keen to have them at the same earth potential, so the outbuilding earth circuits will be wired back, via the supply cable, to the house earthing point. Would it be a good idea, when the outbuilding goes up, to install an earth rod, and connect to that as well (not instead of) the house earth? This would therefore mean that the single house/outbuilding earth circuit would be physically connected to the earth at two different locations.