I found 6 spurs in my lounge and it made me think about the whole spur thing, I believe according to accepted standards it's fine to add a double socket spur from a RFC socket using 2.5mm cable. Now that cable will probably be rated 23Amps, yet you can plug 2x13 amp devices into a double socket, giving a total of 26Amps.
At first I thought that's probably acceptable since the cable will have a degree of tolerence in rather than an absolute 23Amp cutoff so the extra 3 should be ok, but then there's adapters and extensions. There's nothing to stop someone plugging a double adapter into one of those sockets and plugging say a 2x13Amp and a 3 amp device say giving you a total of 29Amps on a cable rated only to 23Amps. A theoretical situation of course, but then a lot of the regs are about theoretical worst case scenarios. So would a 23Amps cable still be ok supplying 29Amps? Since the main circuit protection would be 32Amps, isn't there a chance that the cable will be damaged?
In theory there is no way to overload a ring in the same way since the circuit protection is lower than the combined cable can cope with anyway.
Will we see a requirement that all spur sockets must be fused sockets or maybe that they should always have a FCU? or maybe that you must use a cable which can cope with at least the maximum current that the circuit protection will allow you to draw? Interestingly, I looked at 4mm cable online and found it was only rated at 25Amps, so only 2 more than 2.5mm, so the next step up would be 6mm cable at 42Amps, difficult to work with? (OK, OK I know I'm ignoring things like voltage drop in this question).
I believe the regs used to allow 2x single spurs from a socket or 1 double, but they were changed to 1xsingle or 1xdouble because people kept upgrading the 2 singles to doubles, maybe they should have only allowed singles instead but that still allows you in theory to overload the spur cable to a point where the circuit protection wont help you.
What's wrong with more than 1 spur from a RFC socket anyway, the spur cables can carry the same load each (same issues as above) and the main protection would kick in at the same point. Is it just considered difficult to work with, or could be hiding a bridge in the ring?
At first I thought that's probably acceptable since the cable will have a degree of tolerence in rather than an absolute 23Amp cutoff so the extra 3 should be ok, but then there's adapters and extensions. There's nothing to stop someone plugging a double adapter into one of those sockets and plugging say a 2x13Amp and a 3 amp device say giving you a total of 29Amps on a cable rated only to 23Amps. A theoretical situation of course, but then a lot of the regs are about theoretical worst case scenarios. So would a 23Amps cable still be ok supplying 29Amps? Since the main circuit protection would be 32Amps, isn't there a chance that the cable will be damaged?
In theory there is no way to overload a ring in the same way since the circuit protection is lower than the combined cable can cope with anyway.
Will we see a requirement that all spur sockets must be fused sockets or maybe that they should always have a FCU? or maybe that you must use a cable which can cope with at least the maximum current that the circuit protection will allow you to draw? Interestingly, I looked at 4mm cable online and found it was only rated at 25Amps, so only 2 more than 2.5mm, so the next step up would be 6mm cable at 42Amps, difficult to work with? (OK, OK I know I'm ignoring things like voltage drop in this question).
I believe the regs used to allow 2x single spurs from a socket or 1 double, but they were changed to 1xsingle or 1xdouble because people kept upgrading the 2 singles to doubles, maybe they should have only allowed singles instead but that still allows you in theory to overload the spur cable to a point where the circuit protection wont help you.
What's wrong with more than 1 spur from a RFC socket anyway, the spur cables can carry the same load each (same issues as above) and the main protection would kick in at the same point. Is it just considered difficult to work with, or could be hiding a bridge in the ring?