Cooker Hood Wiring

Terence · Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2004 12:04 pm Post Subject: Cooker Hood Wiring

Can anyone help? I am trying to fit a new cooker extractor and was going to use the existing cable which I detached some time ago from the old unit. The problem is, the cable has a Red, Black, Yellow and Earth wire and the extractor has the usual Brown, Blue and Earth. Which do I connect?

IanDB · Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2004 1:59 pm Post Subject:

Red is LIVE, Black is NETRAL, Yellow/Green (or bare copper) is EARTH.

Just to confuse everybody all UK house wiring is like this. However for domestic appliances the equivalent colours are:- Brown is LIVE, Blue is NEUTRAL and Green/Yellow is EARTH.

Rumour has it that at some point in the near future house wiring will conform to the latter set of colours but it will take 100 years for all the old housing stock to wear out and by that time we'll have a new set of domestic wiring colours anyway.

Having re-read your post, what is Yellow and earth? Do you have four wires or have I mis-read it?

Terence · Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2004 2:07 pm Post Subject: Cooker Hood

Yes, there are 4 wires. It is the yellow one which is confusing me and the cable disappears behind the plasterboard, so I can't trace it back to a spur or socket of any kind.

Kimba · Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2004 4:42 pm Post Subject:

Time to get a multimeter out!

It seems likely the yellow might be some for of control wire from the light switch of something, but only definate (And safe) way to trace it will be disconecting the circuit back at the Consumer Unit and then tracing it using a simple continuity test.