davezawadi

Posts: 4259
Joined: 26 June 2002
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I hope that everyone has examined the pictures in the fire report from Zoro carefully.
The interesting feature is that the CU does not seem to be the culprit in almost all of them, and in the one picture where it obviously was, the plastic has nicely self extinguished in exactly the way that is intended!
So this report proves that the evidence for this change is about as scanty as could be imagined, exactly as discussed by a number of us from our own experience. Now all we have to do is identify why such evidence has been used to make a change to BS7671, and exactly who is responsible, and for what reason they carried out this action.
As discussed by me and several others, containment is not an option available to the "new" CU designer, so what can we expect?
Moving on I wonder how the house builders are going to wire all the new properties they claim to be building next year? Clearly there is no option to fit plastic CUs, and there is no complying alternative available! Fitting a conventional metal CU is also unlikely to comply as they do not contain fire any better than plastic ones due to all the holes for MCBs to poke through etc, perhaps these houses are going to get the "industrial switchgear" look, with solid doors and big chrome handles, not forgetting fireproof glands on all the cable holes too.
I await the fudge factors from the clubs to allow these new installations to be given EICs, although they might try the usual thing of issuing without sight of the installations.
I hope that completion certs will not be available from Building Control due to non-compliance with partP R&R???
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David BSc CEng MIET
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