Bathroom "Vanity Unit"

[ban-all-sheds]

I must wait now to jump on one of B-A-S's postings when he's next tired or in a hurry.. no I don't mind a bit.

Me neither - all's fair in poking fun...

I think most people may have noticed that in certain conditions B-A-S= Unruhestifter (I think I might have found a way how to fool the auto censor BTW)

Not a word that would have been censored anyway. But I'm not! Schadelijk maybe, at times....

Agree totally with other posters - if the tiles are off, conduit is so much better. You may need to chisel a bit of a groove for it to lie in so it is below the surface properly.

Indeed - cut the channel for the conduit, and the holes for the back boxes so that they lay below the surface, and the conduit can be plastered, or just filled, over. You want the tiler to have a flat surface to work to. The tiler will be able to cut holes in the tiles as he fits them to leave access to the boxes, but when he's gone, make sure that he's not filled the screw lugs with adhesive, and if necessary remove it before it sets.

And talking of screw lugs, as the boxes will end up below the surface the standard screws for the accessories might not be long enough, so it might be worth getting some longer ones (M3.5, raised countersunk) just in case.

Oval conduit does not fit well into the round knockouts in boxes, but if you soften the end with a hairdryer you can squash it into a round shape that will go through the holes.

There are many ways to hold it in place while the plaster sets - ..I have seen screws and bag ties, masonry nails at funny angles, blobs of mastic, double sided tape and all sorts of tricks used , and even with the tacky ones, once the plaster has set

All of those work, but if you've got both ends going through the holes in metal boxes, which are fixed into the wall, and you do a neat job with the channel, you probably won't need anything to hold it in place. I would advise making up some very stiff filler or plaster though, and putting a layer of that into the (wetted) channel before you put the conduit in so that it squeezes into any gaps so that you provide a solid and unmoving base for plastering or filling afterwards.

 

[mapj1]

those wondering what that double Dutch was all about, try the equivalant German spelling of
"schädlich"
in the Leo enginehttp://leo.dict.org
and of course my original suggestion
Nederlander eh?
where whould we be without them
Now why doesn't google do Dutch to English I wonder..
goedenacht ..

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Nederlander eh?

No - I tried ROT-13 and a go at anagram-solving with your first word, and then thought "well, it looks German, so....". I just used Dutch for mine out of mischief.

where whould we be without them

Well, we wouldn't have our supermarkets stuffed with glossy, uniform and utterly tasteless tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers etc, for a start...

Now why doesn't google do Dutch to English I wonder..

Dunno - Altavista's Babelfish does.

matulog balon.

 

[caress]

Gentlemen,
I have in my hand one "Minor Electrical Installation works certificate" BS 7671. All my wiring and plastering is done, my vanity unit is in place. Thanks to you folks I knew excatly what to ask for and got exactly that.

A big thank you to all of you that helped and "mucho besos" to all of you (not literally ).

Kind regards

Maria.

 

[Agile]

I have serious doubts that this item can safely be connected in a bathroom at all.

Surely any 230 v equipment below ceiling height, even if fixed wired, in a bathroom must conform to stringent IP ratings that this item probably does not comply with.

In any case again surely it must be supplied from a RCD mounted outside the bathroom as well ( not just the lighting circuit ).

Tony Glazier
( G8ABQ )

 

[mapj1]

If it is constructed like a shaving mirror light for example, and as it uses ELV lamps and has an enclosed Xformer, its unlikely to be a problem.
In any case the guy doing the installation must have been happy to sign it off. Rememer you can have pretty much any domestic applience off a fused spur in a bathroom, subject to it being suitable for the environment. So washing machines, tumble dryers, heaters are quite OK in the UK Z3 of the bathroom.
Actually as a side observation most of the civilised world you can have normal 230V mains socket too, and I expect that one day we will wake up and realise the risk is not as bad as we like to think -after all, Paris and Berlin are not full of dead bodies from socket in bathroom related accidents are they? As far as I can tell, at least in Europe the ban on sockets in Z3 of a bathroom applies to only Irelend, Malta and the UK, i.e. only those using the IEE wiring regs as a base.

 

[Agile]

But this unit sounds as if the lamp is within a few hundred mm of the taps and basin.

As far as a Certificate is concerned some people will sign anything!

Last Sunday I saw a NICEIC certificate for a property where the boiler supply was from a twisted wire joint underneath covered with insulating tape. A cheap substitute for an unswitched fused spur ? Trouble is the tenants brother is a sparks and had pointed it out to him as questionable!

Tony Glazier
G8ABQ

 

[mapj1]

Hmm, fair do's I to have seen some odd NIC jobs to put it politely.
I must admit, to me vanity unit is mirror faced cupboard with a lamp at the top, or arrangedn more like theater make up lights, which was why I phrased my answers the way I did.
http://www.bathroomheaven.com/bh_buyonline/mirror_cabinets
picture 2 was the kind of think I was visualising, perhaps with a built in sink as part of the set-up.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I have serious doubts that this item can safely be connected in a bathroom at all.

Why? What possible grounds do you have for thinking that?

Surely any 230 v equipment below ceiling height, even if fixed wired, in a bathroom must conform to stringent IP ratings that this item probably does not comply with.

It was sold in this country for a bathroom - what possible grounds do you have for saying it "probably" does not meet "stringent" IP ratings? BTW - I wouldn't call IPx4 "stringent". You're not one of these NICEIC bods who tries to make up new regulations of your own, are you?

In any case again surely it must be supplied from a RCD mounted outside the bathroom as well ( not just the lighting circuit ).

"Must"?? Who says "must"? Even if we accept that this is NICEIC-scare-speak for "should", what possible grounds do you have for believing that the unit is installed in Zone 1? And why does the RCD have to be outside the bathroom?

Remember what I said about NICEIC making up their own regulations?

 

[ban-all-sheds]

But this unit sounds as if the lamp is within a few hundred mm of the taps and basin.

You're making this up as you go along, aren't you. Where in this topic did you read that?