Need some office conversion help...I might have goofed...

Hi All,

Recently converted my garage into an office at home. Now, I thought I would be clever (read cheap as I did all the work myself) and simply extend the existing singular socket that was in the garage by hanging a number of additional sockets off it. These would be for PC, printer etc. i.e. nothing heavy duty.

Now, reading your excellent forums today it seems what I have done is taken a socket that was on a ring main and created a radial spur off it. This spur btw has about 10 sockets and the way I intended to wire them was to take the cable from the back of the existing socket and run it from socket to socket until the end of the run in radial style.

Am I being stupid hanging a radial spur off a socket like this? If I run a wire from my last socket back to the original \\\'spur\\\' point will it be an extention of the ring main again ?

Any help or advice here would be much appreciated

Thanks,

Jack

u cud add the new radial to the main ring via a FCU. but this means the total load on the FCU side cant be more than 13A

murphyj said:

Am I being stupid hanging a radial spur off a socket like this?

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Yes.

If I run a wire from my last socket back to the original \\\'spur\\\' point will it be an extention of the ring main again ?

Click to expand...

Only if you make it so. Simply attaching a loop of cable to one point, i.e a socket, does not exend the ring.

What you have done, is as others point out not allowed. However, assuming it is already working, the easist think is to make the new work pass though a 13A switch fuse, then the load can never be more than the socket you took out to add on. Otherwise you must break into the ring, and bring both halves into the new room, one to each end of the new section of ring. Otherwise you create a cross connected ring, which would overload the cable on one side of the ring, if you are very unlucky with cable lengths and load distribution.
In practice, unless you plug in a large load (say >3kW total) then you wont have a problem, even if you don't fix it by one of the above methods, but someone else might one day.

Are you certain that the original circuit was actually a ring and not a radial circuit? Just checking because I see you're in Ireland, where rings are less common than the U.K.