Search results

You're lucky - most of the houses I've lived in didn't even have lighting in the loft, let alone power! :) It sounds like you are proposing to add a spur to the upstairs ring - no problem, as long as it really is a ring. It means you have to get three wires into each terminal of the socket...

LOL! Or as in this case, "make"! What is the likely surviveable current for a 6kA MCB? Cheers, Howard

Not if they are taken at the CU - he's measuring the external wiring up to the CU, not that in the house. Would be interesting indeed if they were taken at the far side of the rings, though! :) Cheers, Howard

This sounds like it might be one switch of a 2-switch arrangement (as usually used in hall/landing) and the 2nd switch has been disconnected/removed. Is this possible? What colour are the singles, by the way? You don't mention any Earth cores - are there any? If you just want the one...

Glad you found the solution! For future reference, you have a similar setup to me, with one of the old terminal boxes (marked "GPO", so that says how old it is!) connecting the incoming pair to an internal 3-pair cable, with one pair going to the Master Socket and the rest unused. The...

Someone's put their Rotweiler in the back and it won't let you in? :D Cheers, Howard

I've never really thought about it before, but seeing it written out like that shows clearly that as the cable gets bigger, the allowed current density in the conductor gets smaller - at 10mm it's less than half that at 1mm (6.5 and 15.5 Amps/sqmm respectively). I suppose it must be the problem...

They're not that good! My sister saw the lightning strike the tree in next-door's garden, and it took out her modem. The phone line wasn't directly involved (that's in front of the house), it was either induced voltage or voltage gradient in the Earth that did it. Cheers, Howard

You realise that the best place to drill is right in the centre of the height of the beam? Since the top is in compression and the bottom in tension, the middle is "neutral", that is contributing little to the structural strength. By notching the top (I know you didn't say that!) you are...

Not necessarily - mine has a rod beside the front door, below the point of entry of the phone cable - the water pipe is at the other end of the house. It's disconnected now, but there used to be a single strand bare copper wire clamped to it, running to the "GPO" terminal box inside the...

Assuming you have wired it correctly, it could be water in the switch (water having run down the drop cable). If the light wasn't on until you switched it on, but then it stayed on when you switched it off it could be there was water on the contacts, then when you switched off a droplet bridged...

Well the Yanks use twisted connections a lot - twist the wires together and then twist one ot those ceramic cones over the top to improve the contact and insulate the join. But they also have aluminium cable, and that is much more susceptible to thermal cycling loosening things because it has a...

Yes, it's certainly gone South (for the winter? :) ) I've replaced it, and all's been OK since, touch wood! Thanks for the advice, everyone. Cheers, Howard

If you look carefully you can find quite a selection at about £3.50 per Watt, but there are some cheaper ones from abroad - there's a US site charging US$3 per Watt, although there's the additions of shipping & VAT (and maybe Import Duty) they still work out that you can get a kilowatt for less...

This is precisely the situation that Part P was supposed to stop - and it looks like it's not even doing what it was designed to do! If you can track them down, there's a chance they could be legally liable to sort it out properly. Cheers, Howard

My target price is a maximum of £3.50 per Watt - you have to shop carefully but this is achievable. The reason I was against grid-tie inverters was that with the payment for generated electricity at almost nothing (0.5p/kWh) it made no sense to use the grid to "store" excess power and then buy...

Right, but I already have a pure-sine inverter! :) Yes, although 3-core seems to be easier to find at decent prices! :) I suppose thinking about it more carefully, I should have the circuits separate, if only so I can isolate them individually. I was planning on using the armour as the...

Yes, I did consider a grid-tie inverter, but they are horendously expensive (well over a £Grand for the size I'd want) and at the time I started looking at this the electricity companies would only pay the generation rate for electricity fed to the grid - about 1/20th of the cost of buying it...

Yup, that's it! Cheers, Howard

One of them to COM, the other to L1 - it doesn't matter which way round, although it would be better to have the red to COM, because that's the way it would be if it was ever converted to use two-way switching (hall/landing stylee). And the black should really have a red sleeve on it to...