K
kai
MB appears to be a cheap budget socket make, It may not have been designed for prolonged heavy duty use in a student residence etc. I've seen them on sale in various pound shops, but NOT in poundland though!
I understood what you meant, but it was you who mentioned 13.1A -suggesting that was the maximum load that those at the very bottom of the specification range would stand without burning, whereas, of course, they would be expected to safely carry 13.0A.No - wrong end of stick. ... What I meant was - with a minimum requirement of 13A and an obviously cheap manufacturing process some of the parts (switch contacts) may actually be capable of carrying a maximum of 14A and some, say, 19A. Consequently the product actually exceeds the minimum specifications but under a load of 19A only one contact would actually suffer damage.Undoubtedly true, although I doubt that anything would 'burn' at 13.1A, but not at 13.0A
Very good point - and it could presumably easily be achieved (at no cost) even in cheap ones merely by bending the contacts appropriately. That could well be the explanation. I must say that, whatever the specs, I always feel a little nervous whenever I see anyone use the switch on a BS 1363 socket to turn of a circuit on-load (when the load is high) - even with 'good quality' sockets. It's something I would never do myself unless it was unavoidable.In some switchgear, L is supposed to break first and make last, so more likely to suffer arcing under load. I don't know if those cheap socket switches would be designed to do the same.
Screwfix sell them (or, at least, did when I last looked). I must say that I'm struggling a little to understand what sort of 'prolonged heavy use' would be likely to produce the sort of damage we're talking about in this thread.MB appears to be a cheap budget socket make, It may not have been designed for prolonged heavy duty use in a student residence etc. I've seen them on sale in various pound shops...
That will be interesting - thanks. However, to do the job properly you'll have to try to work out the nature of this 'abusing' which students are allegedly doing, and then reproduce thatI shall fit an MB socket to my socket testing rig, test it to death and let you know how it does.
We'd have to ask martinxxxxxx about the history of that socket, but I suspect that you might have to go on doing that for a few years, and throw in some of the alleged 'abuse', to reproduce whatever happened to the one we're discussing!That seems a bit unfair on the socket! I start off at 13A over the two outlets, then a single 13A load, then 26A over the two outlets and then a single 26A load. Each test for four hours with a pure resistive load.
how often has the shed burned down?
Strangely enough - zero.And how big are your bills???
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