IET Forums - Have I gone mad or did i just hear that right ? No plastic fuseboards.

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27 February 2015 06:28 PM
phantom9 Posts: 1757 Joined: 16 December 2002	@psychic I agree with your assessment on this. The difficulty we face as electricians is knowing whether a product claimed to be compliant with a British Standard (as required by BS7671) is in fact compliant. It is quite unreasonable to expect us to know whether a manufacturer has supplied us with a product that meets the standard it is supposed to meet when it is quite reasonable on our part to expect that it is. The current wording of the regulation seems to embody manufacturing requirements. I have made the point in previous posts that the wording is impossible to apply in reality as it requires some form of verification on our part that the CU is manufactured from non-combustible material. Given the current track record of manufacturers claiming to supply CUs meeting the current standard and evidence suggesting otherwise, why should the new Reg make any difference? Making CUs from metal brings its own risks outside of fire, eddy currents in cable entry points, possible shorting of wiring on to the casing, increased difficulty with adapting them to receive cable entry and similar issues. I was thinking today that the CU cannot itself be treated as potentially dangerous. It is absolutely not the case. The purpose of a CU is to enable the safe distribution of electricity ie without exposing people to electrocution hazard and being able to withstand fault currents without exploding. The introduction of another factor, that of fire, is a muddled. It is clear that implicating a CU to be dangerous because of fire risk is causing a great deal of upset but one thing that cannot be allowed to happen is coding them as C1 or C2 during an EICR. This is absolutely unnecessary and unacceptable. If a product is IMPROVED then that is an improvement on something extant. It is not, as implied by some on this forum, making plastic fuseboards dangerous. They were not dangerous before the improvement and it is certainly no more dangerous because an improvement. That is the point I am trying to enforce. People cannot judge something as dangerous by virtue of words in a Regulation. C3 is improvement recommended. So a plastic fuse-board is in need of improvement; it is not dangerous. That is the point most people are missing I think you and I agree on that point.
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27 February 2015 09:02 PM
dg66 Posts: 1712 Joined: 11 January 2008	Personally I wouldn't even code it , I'd just put a comment to the effect of , consumer units compliance with combustability requirements is unknown , the electrical installation is safe for continued use , as long as everything is installed correctly within the CU there should be no problems , all the connections will have been checked whilst carrying out the EICR. ------------------------- Regards Dave(not Cockburn)
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28 February 2015 07:52 AM
davezawadi Posts: 4259 Joined: 26 June 2002	But Phantom9, they were dangerous (the statutory body says so) and there were a large number of fires. How is this not dangerous? ------------------------- David BSc CEng MIET
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28 February 2015 09:34 AM
phantom9 Posts: 1757 Joined: 16 December 2002	Originally posted by: davezawadi But Phantom9, they were dangerous (the statutory body says so) and there were a large number of fires. How is this not dangerous? I think what has come out of this debate is quite surprising, Dave. We as electricians can only buy electrical equipment supplied in good faith by the electrical wholesalers. Each and every item has a BS or BS EN number that the product is manufactured to, as required for it to be used by BS7671. However, if it is discovered that the product does not comply, as the statutory body is saying, it is the manufacturers fault and it is non-compliant in respect of combustibility. I agree with you on that point. However, you have also recognised that the item itself is not dangerous when said about finding loose terminations and having to tighten them all. It is not the fuse board itself that causes the danger but shoddy workmanship. Shoddy workmanship leads to high resistance terminations. High resistance terminations cause heat and heat if the temperature reaches critical levels causes fire. The big problem highlighted in this thread is, what exactly is the issue? Is it that some fuse boards are now known to be non-compliant and should never have been supplied? Or is it that plastic fuse boards are deemed inappropriate per se? Or is it that increasing numbers of fires in fuse boards are making the issue more prominent, so much so that a knee jerk reaction is to introduce a clumsy Regulation in an attempt to improve on things? The daft part is we have a manufacturing problem being transferred in to an installation requirement that has split the electrical industry in to different camps. Some are adamant that when the Reg comes in to force on 1 Jan 2016 all plastic fuse boards are then deemed immediately dangerous and EICR will flag up C1s. Some see it the same way but perhaps a C2 is more appropriate as the danger is potential rather than immediate. Others see this as no more than a C3 because existing plastic fuse boards won't comply with the new Reg but going forward things will be improved. Yet another camp see that some may not have been manufactured properly to existing standards and that a recall is necessary. Had the fuse boards been made properly in the first place then the new Reg would have been more straightforward to accept as an improvement on what is there but instead the mention of metal in Note 1 as deeming to comply with non-combustible has muddled everything up so we don't exactly know where we stand. Its a real mess.
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28 February 2015 12:44 PM
davezawadi Posts: 4259 Joined: 26 June 2002	Actually I agree with you Phantom. Remember my first post (I think) where I said it would bring the IET into disrepute? The problem has been made in two ways: 1. Non compliant product (as far as we can tell from the outside, we do not have total verification yet) 2. A of the worst kind by fiddling with the problem in exactly the wrong place (BS7671). How any of this happened, is completely beyond me and smells strongly of politics not engineering. I have complained to a number of people, who are so far silent, probably as they realise that embarrassment is very uncomfortable when in any kind of public office. In fact this has been pushed out of proportion by the statutory body. But that is not our problem either, the only action we can take is to check every CU screw we come across and tighten as much as possible. I would love to know if the problem has been caused or exacerbated by smart meters, but it is unlikely that we will ever know unless a DNO is prosecuted under the EAWR for bad workmanship. Certainly my own experience of the smart meter installation is terrible (it failed!). The tails left were still tight so I cannot complain, but then I did tighten them fully in the first place! I'm sure you have read the rest of my posts, and I await the legal action with interest! Regards -------------------------** David BSc CEng MIET
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