Service Head Wire Routing

[holmslaw]

..

 

[westie101]

^^^^^^^^
What he said

 

[ban-all-sheds]

The tubes are 40mm odd and at least 3-4mm thick.

Sounds like scaffolding poles.

 

[Wontdothatagain]

This is a commercial property with a residential flat above. The service comes into the commercial property and is then looped from the service head up to the flat above. It is buried in the wall in a steel tube, probably a scaffold tube they found on site when they were being built.

You can see in the second picture that there are no cables other than the ones coming from the meter.

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• Wontdothatagain
• 11 Mar 2011
• 1

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• Wontdothatagain
• 11 Mar 2011
• 1

Standing outside my front door, i can see 12 propertys like this and there are 15, 3 story blocks of flats close by that are connected the same. I know of a town close by with loads of social housing flats connected the same way.


As for rising mains, in blocks of flats, the service head is the Ryfield cabinet as this has the larger BS88 fuses in it. From the cabinet, it will be glanded and fed to the separate propertys above in concentric cable where there will be another service head for the flat in question. Consider this, meter is being replaced in a flat on the 15th floor, during the meter exchange, the fuse will need to be pulled and re-enserted about 3-4 times if the job is being done properly. How do think that it is practical for the meter operator to go up and down that many times.

If i can get in there on Monday, i will take some pictures of a Ryfied cabinet like i have explained above feeding about 15 flats above a very large pub/restaurant in the town. The concentric cable runs partly on tray, in trunking and buried in walls.

 

[westie101]

This is a commercial property with a residential flat above

That totally fails to meet any modern standards.
1/ topside loop to the flat above so flat tenant does not have 24hr access to main fuse (big problem if it blows out of hours)

2/ two customers "sharing" the same main fuse, they should have one each

3/ Singles going up to flat possible in an unearthed pipe and no sign of an earth going to the flat.

Though there is no need for the REC to take retrospective action unless major work is planned at the address.

(at least there is a (max 100A) fuse protecting the cables in the pipe!)

 

[Wontdothatagain]

I know of this property because we recently re-wired one of the comercial property, a Laundrette. We had concerns about the rising cable and called the DNO. They attended and said that the cable was in a servisable condition. We asked him to trace the cable up the wall as we wanted to mount some equipment on it and when he tried with the underground tester it would not detect after 18" and he said it was because it was in a steel tube

1/ topside loop to the flat above so flat tenant does not have 24hr access to main fuse (big problem if it blows out of hours)

It is on its own seperate fuse if you look closley

2/ two customers "sharing" the same main fuse, they should have one each

They have

3/ Singles going up to flat possible in an unearthed pipe and no sign of an earth going to the flat above

So on a PME, overhead supply, how many conductors are there?????????

 

[westie101]

It is on its own separate fuse if you look closely

Oops missed that

So on a PME, overhead supply, how many conductors are there?

Er we can't give a PME supply from a non PME cable.

 

[Wontdothatagain]

SSE do

 

[westie101]

SSE do

Different interpretations of the PME Regs' seem to be in force

 

[Wontdothatagain]

Just went and asked the people above the property from the pictures i posted if i could take a pic of there servise head. You can see it is PME coming from the bottom of the N block and yes that is a steel tube going into the head, not plastic

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• Wontdothatagain
• 11 Mar 2011
• 2

 

[holmslaw]

..

 

[westie101]

Holmslaw

Sorry but Wontdothatagain is correct in his take of ownership of the cables, those arrangements are common in older installations

 

[holmslaw]

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[holmslaw]

..

 

[westie101]

he is talking nonsense

37 years working for what is now a DNO tells me different.

We (I) were installing similar in the early 80's. If we come across this we usually try to put a concentric in the pipe!

The last ones were a 3phase cutout in a large ODVC, one fuse used to supply the adjacent flat the other two controlling concentric cable to the flats above where they were terminated in ODVCs with a standard cutout and metered at that point.
There are flats with DNO rising 3phase mains in existance