Discuss Currys cooker installation.... in the Electrical Appliances Forum area at ElectriciansForums.net

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Got a call from potential customer today.... Currys have said they won't install a new cooker as the property has an overhead supply and no RCD....

I'm going tomorrow to check out the facts but I was wondering if they are being too cautious?

Discuss!
 
what's a RCD got to do with a cooker installation? as long as the Zs reading is within parameters.
 
I had that with Curry's years ago , I was first fixing the house when they arrived . They plugged a looop tester in , it was TT installation and the reading was not on their bit of paper , so the would not connect it up.
The old installation had an rcd though.
Perhaps in your case it has a socket outlet on the cooker unit and...
 
reminds me.... some time ago, currys job. they came out to this customer with a new cooker. existing point was a standard 45A switch to CCU. "can't fit it mate. it's got a plug on.we need a socket to plug into". so along i come, remove CCU and fit a BS1363. currys come back, plug in cooker. all well. not quite. new cooker has a duff fan that runs constantly. back come currys, can't fix it, so order a replacement cooker. this arrives 3 days later. " can't fit it mate. it needs to be hard wired into a CCU, you have a socket there".
 
Got a call from potential customer today.... Currys have said they won't install a new cooker as the property has an overhead supply and no RCD....

I'm going tomorrow to check out the facts but I was wondering if they are being too cautious?

Discuss!
Lack of knowledge maybe, over cautious you will find out tomorrow. Keep us informed.
 
UPDATE:

So I paid the caller a visit this afternoon.

So yes an overhead supply

Next a cursory Zs at the cooker isolator / socket:

Currys cooker installation.... Currys 1 - EletriciansForums.net

Oops, sorry its upside down, but a Zs or 0.49 ohms is OK

Next a quick peep inside the meter box:

Currys cooker installation.... Currys 2 - EletriciansForums.net

So a supplier earth....

All seems OK to me
 
This is a good thing, they encounter a situation they are uncertain about and advise the customer to get an electrician to check it out.
in this case it was all fine, but that's far better than the opposite situation occurring where they could have just cracked on with connecting it when in actual fact there was a problem which they aren't qualified or competent to detect.
 
Yes it is easy to knock these people and they are just following instructions.

Exactly, they don't have the knowledge to do any more than that and so they don't, if kitchen fitters worked this way the world would be a safer place.

It's easy to knock these people for not connecting a cooker in what appears to be a straightforward situation, but they don't have the knowledge we do to be able to decide that it's a straightforward situation, Andy if they did then they wouldn't be driving a currys delivery van.

I suspect that these people are delivery drivers working to a tight schedule who don't want to be connecting appliances but are doing it because currys etc decided to start offering a fitting service. I doubt they get anything more than cursory training or get paid any more than they did before they had to start connecting appliances.
 
I think Currys and other similar companies charge around £70-£80 for 'installing' an electric cooker. I'd happily do half a dozen every day for that, but as Dave said I doubt the poor blokes lumbered with the additional work get any extra pay - and with the size of cable involved I bet many aren't quite right !
 
Another update:

Got another call yesterday... the Curry's chaps had been back out, had read my thoughts, continued to look for an earth rod.... then decided they weren't competent to make a decision........
 
I was called-out to a job today after Curry's installers had notified the customer that she needed an electrician to fit an RCD to the cooker circuit due to the "earth loop impedance reading being too high". When I arrived at the customer's house she showed me a green-coloured 'Electrical Appliance Installation Certificate' that the installers had given her after fitting - but not connecting - her new oven. The measured Zs value of the cooker circuit as recorded on the certificate was 73.2 ohms!!! I did my own Zs test and found the Zs value to be 62.38 ohms. My first conclusion was that one of us needs to get their multi-meter calibrated, and it sure ain't me as my Megger MFT 1730 was calibrated just three weeks ago!

I then did a Ze test which returned a reading of 62.5 ohms. I was unable to trace the final destination of the main earthing conductor as there was no main earthing terminal present! The main earth goes straight under under floorboards after it comes out the consumer unit. As the property is part of a row of terraced houses in a Glasgow suburb, the earthing system is highly unlikely to be TT. It is much more likely that the property is fed from a service head located in the property next door. I gave the customer the contact number for Scottish Power Networks and advised her to contact them post-haste as there wasn't anything else that I could do.

Curry's installers are refusing flat-out to connect the customer's new oven unless an RCD is fitted. Fortunately, since the consumer unit is a split-load type, it was simply just a case of transferring the cooker circuit over to the RCD-protected side so to comply. :D

I am greatly alarmed to have discovered that domestic installers are finding extremely high Zs values on final circuits they test, yet are advising customers that the fitting of an RCD solves the problem when such an instance of an extremely high Zs value clearly requires further investigation so to determine the cause. I despair.:(
 

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