Outdoor Lights and Plug

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I want to install an outdoor light and plug socket. I have a spare plug socket inside the house and so I don't want to wire the outdoor light and plug to the consumer unit.

Am I allowed to installed an exterior plug and light and simply attach a plug to the end with an RCD breaker?

Or do building regs and electrical regs prohibit this?

Thanks in advance for any answers
 
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Do you mean that you want to plug-in the outdoor socket to the indoor socket or extend the indoor socket circuit to provide an outside socket?
 
Sorry I should have been more clear. I wanted to plug the outdoor light and socket into the indoor socket.
 
You can have an outdoor socket that is plugged in to an internal socket by use of an RCD adapted plug.
The external socket must be IP rated suitably for external location.
 
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Am I allowed to installed an exterior plug and light and simply attach a plug to the end with an RCD breaker?
Your socket circuit should already be RCD protected - if it isn't you should think about getting that changed.


Or do building regs and electrical regs prohibit this?
No, but good taste and pride in ones work does.

Coming directly off the CU is not the only alternative - you could add an FCU to the socket circuit and supply the outside socket from that. Use an RCD FCU if the circuit isn't already RCD protected, but as I said, if it isn't it should be.
 
Thanks for the replies. It was only rewired fairly recently so the sockets will prob be protected. However I will add another so if it trips it won't trip all the other plugs too. Cheers!
 
Thanks for the replies. It was only rewired fairly recently so the sockets will prob be protected. However I will add another so if it trips it won't trip all the other plugs too. Cheers!
It doesn't work like that.

Firstly, both devices will almost certainly have the same ratings - 30mA and 30ms. So there is no discrimination between the devices. In practice, what is likely to happen is that the mechanical delay between sensing the fault and activating the trip, and the mechanical contacts actually being open, means that both devices will trip - ie although one may trip faster than the other, it's contacts might not have physically opened before the slower device has operated and started the mechanical process fo opening it's contacts. But as BAS says - nothing is guaranteed when you put devices in series without suitable discrimination.

If if you (for example) found an MCB that tripped on a lower fault current (say you found one with a 10mA/30ms rating) then you still won't have effective discrimination. Unless the fault really were of a very low level, then what actually happens is that you (for example) touch a live part and significantly more than 30mA fault current flows. This is more than enough to trip both devices. So both devices detect the fault, and within 30ms will have tripped and turned off the supply. Again, unless one happens to trip somewhat faster than the other, then it's most likely that both will trip.

Note the bit about the fault current being more than 30mA. An RCD does not restrict the magnitude of the fault current (that is set by the nature of the circuit forming the fault path) - all it does is disconnect the supply within a specified time which has been shown to be "reasonably safe" in a large proportion of situations. There is always a tradeoff - devices acting faster on lower fault currents would probably be safer in more situations, but would be more prone to nuisance tripping which can in itself be a hazard.

Where discrimination is required between RCDs in series, then it's done on a time basis. It's not normally needed in a domestic environment, but if there were a need for two devices in series, then the upstream one would have a longer operating time so that the downstream one could operate and disconnect the final circuit before the upstream device reaches it's time threshold.

So if you already have RCD protection, then adding another one will not (in the general case) add protection. It'll just be something else to trip and be a nuisance.
 
Firstly, both devices will almost certainly have the same ratings - 30mA and 30ms.
Whilst it is true that 30ms is not an unusual trip time to see with a 30mA RCD, I'm not sure what you mean by a 'rating' of 30mS. Per the Standard, a 30mA RCD is required to trip in ≤300ms at 30mA residual current, ≤150ms at 60mA and ≤40mS at 150mA, those figures being broadly derived from the current x time shock levels which are regarded as being physiologically 'fairly safe' in reasonably healthy people.

I agree with the rest of what you say.

Kind Regards, John
 
Err, because pretty well every RCD I've seen that's intended for a domestic environment has had a 30ms trip time ?

I suppose you'll now show me loads of RCBOs and RCD FCUs with other than 30mA/30ms ratings :rolleyes:
 
The majority of RCDs have an IΔn rating of 30mA, but like John says, the trip time will vary according to the severity of the fault, and anything up to 300mS is acceptable on a standard 30mA RCD with a fault of 1xIΔn
 
Err, because pretty well every RCD I've seen that's intended for a domestic environment has had a 30ms trip time ?
If you mean that when you test it at 30mA, you'll commonly get a trip time of about 30ms (which is far lower than the required max of 300ms), I've already agreed with that, but ....
I suppose you'll now show me loads of RCBOs and RCD FCUs with other than 30mA/30ms ratings :rolleyes:
I think it's easier than that - I can't say that I've ever seen any 30mA RCD which has a 'rating' of 30ms - are you really sure that you have?

Kind Regards, John
 
The majority of RCDs have an IΔn rating of 30mA, but like John says, the trip time will vary according to the severity of the fault, and anything up to 300mS is acceptable on a standard 30mA RCD with a fault of 1xIΔn
Although the maximum permissible trip time does vary with fault current (for the physiological reason I mentioned), I'm not at all sure that the actual trip time does usually vary all that much according to the magnitude of the fault current - after all, the 'trip speed' is going to depend primarily on the spring etc. mechanism, regardless of what current caused it to operate. Hence, if a device is such as to have the required ≤ 40ms trip time at 5 x IΔn, it will probably have 'much the same' trip time at 1 x IΔn.

Kind Regards, John
 

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