whjohnson

Posts: 938
Joined: 24 January 2009
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Watch the IET's Mark Coles give an explanation on youtube.
It's on the IET Channel.
I watched it yesterday, and the first thing which struck me was the fact that today's consumer units are deliberately designed by beancounters to be as cheap and as nasty as they can get away with.
Look at the facts.
A couple of years ago, you could get a CU with all-brass terminal blocks complete with brass screws.
There were big chunky pieces of copper present for other main parts.
What do we have now? Tiny narrow brass alloy terminal blocks for the neutral & earth, complete with cadmium-coated cheap n' nasty steel screws with multipoint heads. Two dissimilar metals with two different temp coefficients of expansion into which is inserted and secured, a third metal of copper.
Guess what? Stuff begins to fail. Cause? "Oh!" say the manufacturers; " You cannot have tightened them up correctly!"
Oh! So its nowt to do with poor materials and design is it?
New Rule Time then -
" Let's transfer the blame onto the end-user by insisting that they all go out and blow £200 on a fancy but next to useless torque screwdriver, otherwise their insurance policies and warranties will be invalid. Doesn't stop the fires, but hey ho, it'll not be us paying out."
Time to revise the standards for CU manufacture and to be prepared to pay a bit more for a better constructed CU manufactured to, and which exceeds, rather than only just complies with a MINIMUM standard.
We need those big beefy same-metal terminals back.
We need carcasses which are rigid and robust, and which don't bend in a breeze.
Oh, and before I go, have you seen how little copper there is inside a modern mcb or rcd these days?
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Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.
Edited: 01 October 2014 at 06:41 PM by whjohnson
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