Date : Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:43:02 +0100
From : philb@... (Phil Blundell)
Subject: Leccy @ Acorn World '09
On Fri, 2009-09-11 at 00:05 +0100, Mick Champion wrote:
> That's good. So long as the circuit is correctly fused at the
> distribution point and the circuit has modern cable, it is as safe. I
> never understood why 13amp plugs were sold with 13 amp fuses as the
> norm. It's a wrong side failure in my opinion. Educate the nation by
> selling plugs with 3 amp fuses as you'd soon learn when your iron blows
> the fuse you need a larger one.
It probably would have been slightly better for plugs to be sold with
small fuses, or no fuses at all, but I suspect the difference is fairly
marginal. If everyone takes away the message that whenever a fuse
blows, you should just swap it with a larger one, you won't be all that
much better off than if everything was just fused at 13A to start with.
In practice of course this is more or less irrelevant now since all new
appliances are required to have an appropriately-fused plug pre-fitted.
> Square 13 amp fused plugs are what? 35 to 40 years old now???
Wikipedia says 1946. Crumbs.
> Are round pinned plugs still used in lighting?
Sometimes. The 5A ones are fairly commonly used to provide centrally
switched or dimmed outlets for free-standing lights. Obviously you
wouldn't want to use a BS1363 socket in that situation because most
appliances would draw too much current for the lighting circuit, and/or
get upset by the
Theatre lighting traditionally uses the 15A plugs, as well. In that
case I think it's mostly a desire to eliminate unnecessary fuses in
hard-to-reach locations, plus again to avoid having other appliances
plugged into the dimmed circuits by mistake.
> > Funnily enough, the current regulations do in fact permit socket outlets
> > in bathrooms (though still subject to some constraints). The blanket
> > prohibition on such outlets was abolished in the 17th edition.
> >
>
> Aside from a shaver socket, is their any real need for sockets in the
> bathroom? I wonder why this has been accepted even with constraints.
> Something to do with Europe perhaps???
It's certainly true that the general trend has been to harmonise the
regs with the rest of Europe as far as possible. For example the 17th
edition also introduced mandatory RCD protection for all sockets, which
has been standard in Europe for a while but wasn't previously required
here.
Aside from that, though, I suspect the change in bathrooms was driven by
a desire to replace some of the relatively arbitrary prohibitions with
more pragmatic ones. Under the new regs you still cannot have a socket
outlet within 3 metres of a bath; almost all appliance flexes are
shorter than that, so this is enough to stop you being able to drop a
live appliance into the bath by mistake, as well as being far enough to
prevent someone in the bath from touching the socket itself.
In most cases you're probably right that there is no real need for
sockets in bathrooms, and in any case a lot of bathrooms are small
enough that the 3-metre limit basically rules them out altogether. But,
if your bathroom is big enough (or if we're talking about a shower
installed in the corner of a bedroom, for example) there's no reason why
sockets shouldn't be legitimate.
p.