Is this installation considered acceptable today? (1-ring including oven and everything else)

[Iain Kay]

Litlespark I cannot condone lying. This is going to cost the landlord money to send an electrician out to look for a fault that doesn't exist. It's unfair on landlord when the installation may be perfectly acceptable in regards to electrical safety.

I'm too honest for this, which is why I posted this up.

I don't want to lie to my LA but I do want to know if this should be considered unsafe.

Basically, as it stands, I told the landlord I'd be moving in and running a lot of kit. I'm happy to demonstrate the load of this with any electrician or LA, so it's nothing illegal lol and nothing to hide.

I just want to know if they're going to do this, or if I'm going to have to offer to pay them to do it.

I've never had a 2-bed flat with a single ring before either. Typical arrangement is 2-rings per flat and usually either side will be on the ring, sometimes alternate rooms which I found really handy when things tripped and you could still get a good plug in lamp from a nearby outlet!

 

[Iain Kay]

How old is the property ?

How old is the electrical installation?

This I'm not sure regarding building/wiring dates.

I know that it has red and black wiring in the ceiling roses as I had to change one of them when my daughters bunk bed was too high so we got a more compact one to hold an uplighter shade.

 

[Iain Kay]

So...up in the morning on with the kettle and some toast to be sure. In with the washing and on with the tumble dryer and in with the turkey while having a shower.
Kettle 3 mins.
Toaster 3 mins.
Washing machine, does it feed from the boiler? i.e. one cold feed or hot and cold feed?
Tumble dryer-No clothes line? anyway is there a prodigious amount of washing clothes to do? Get economy tariff and wash on a timer stagger the loads between night and day.
Oven, cut down on the roasts? perhaps roast the Turkey after the washathon?
Anyway I don't think any landlord or LA will respond or re-wire the property due to your unusual energy usage patterns. And at that I imagine in reality nothing will happen with all due respect, you are reacting to a paper tiger you made constructed from figures that you have not tempered in contrast with reality.

That's a fair enough point. With regards to the kitchen load, yeah, that could be fairly sporadic and not constant load. Maybe not a huge concern.

That's not the case with PCs in a lab deliberately ramped up to 100% usage though, that's always going to pull whatever the hardware demands and that'll run till I stop it.

My issue is that I do have a fairly large load on the ring throughout the house at any one time, plus all of that on the top.

Never seen anything like this. I'm used to oven/kitchen/2-rings for house/shower/lights/lights 2.

 

[Iain Kay]

Hi - my advice too is - use and enjoy your new home. In my humble opinion the shower must be separate, and it is. The rest is really up to loading. If it causes you trouble with MCB tripping or you see/smell smoke then obviously something's not right.

Will bear this in mind and try to worry somewhat less, wait and see when/if the MCB starts tripping regularly.

 

[Gavin John Hyde]

Having everything on one circuit is a lot more common than is perhaps ideal, Was in a 2 bed house surveying for a rewire recently. It had 3 circuits. one sockets, one lights and one for the oven. Had an redundant mcb for the immersion heater that had been taken out and a combi boiler in its place fed from the ring.
Not the best way of doing things but was installed like that when built. it all comes down to load and whats connected.

 

[Iain Kay]

The obvious answer here is to not start you washing, drying, oven and kettle all at the same time, stagger the starting of these and diversity will come in to effect.
If you are switching everything on simultaneously then I would say it seems you are deliberately trying to force an issue.
What type of oven is it? I don’t think I’ve seen one yet where all elements can be switched on simultaneously, most at least have a separate grill element which cannot be ok at the same time as the oven element.

I don’t see any particular issue to raise with your Lettings agent, your landlord is not obliged to provide an electrical installation to suit your personal requirements, they only have to ensure that the installation is safe.

Where do your figures of 7.2kW and 5.76kW for a ring circuit come from? By my calculation 32A 7.68kW

Is all of this IT equipment purely for home (non-business) use? If any of it is for business use then you may not want to involve the LA as such use of the property is normally not allowed in a residential letting.

I would strongly advise against making any alteration to the installation yourself, or having any alteration made without written permission from your landlord.
Having done work for lettings agents in the past I have occasionally removed such alterations at the tenants expense.


If you are ‘stressing the system’ as you put it then it is likely that you are the one at fault here as your tenancy contract will require you to take all reasonable steps to prevent damage to the property.

To be fair, I used an online calculator to reach that sum based upon the 32A, 230V, AC single phase and power factor of 1.0. In my defense it was 1.30am.

Then subtracted 20% for a constant load running over the wiring.

 

[Iain Kay]

Did you get any electrical certificates from the letting agency, when you took over the house?

You know, I thought I did but I've looked over all of the paperwork and it's just gas.

I will get in touch with them on this point.

 

[Darkwood]

My MCBs are not tripping regularly, a few times since moving in, presumably because they're Type B so they'll take 3-5 times the current to trip?


I think you need to read up on the characteristics of protective devices, the type of a device as in an MCB is the inrush allowance so a 10amp mcb with a 3-5times tripping curve will allow for a device to have an inrush <30amps without tripping. Because it has a varied range IE 3 - 5x rating then inrushes of between 30-50amps may periodically trip the mcb. Inrushes exceeding 5 x rating will trip the mcb everytime.

 

[Iain Kay]

Having everything on one circuit is a lot more common than is perhaps ideal, Was in a 2 bed house surveying for a rewire recently. It had 3 circuits. one sockets, one lights and one for the oven. Had an redundant mcb for the immersion heater that had been taken out and a combi boiler in its place fed from the ring.
Not the best way of doing things but was installed like that when built. it all comes down to load and whats connected.

I suppose this may be part of the issue.

If they're doing electrical testing whilst this flat is vacant then it's unfurnished, there's absolutely no load except the kitchen.

The tumble dryer is my addition that I've taken with me through the past few properties so I'm not sure if it would ever have been tested in any similar configuration with an actual load throughout the house like a modern family would have.

 

[The Ghost]

My Mother used to use the iron on lighting flex from a bayonet cap holder from the ceiling (i.e. take the bulb out and plug the iron in) she used to iron for about three hours, guess what?...nothing happened ever except the ironing.

 

[Iain Kay]

My MCBs are not tripping regularly, a few times since moving in, presumably because they're Type B so they'll take 3-5 times the current to trip?


I think you need to read up on the characteristics of protective devices, the type of a device as in an MCB is the inrush allowance so a 10amp mcb with a 3-5times tripping curve will allow for a device to have an inrush <30amps without tripping. Because it has a varied range IE 3 - 5x rating then inrushes of between 30-50amps may periodically trip the mcb. Inrushes exceeding 5 x rating will trip the mcb everytime.

Does this mean that if I can never flip the MCB back on, it's got an inrush current of 5x its rating when everything comes on?

That would be 160A... That can't be right!

 

[The Ghost]

PCs in a lab deliberately ramped up to 100%

Sounds like a commercial usage in domestic premises, there is a lot of issues with that in intself. Maybe you need an office? Still say paper tiger.

 

[Iain Kay]

My Mother used to use the iron on lighting flex from a bayonet cap holder from the ceiling (i.e. take the bulb out and plug the iron in) she used to iron for about three hours, guess what?...nothing happened ever except the ironing.

My gran used to have one of these devices. Never burned her house down.

I actually don't know of an occurrence where an electrical fire has ever burnt down a house, every time I've heard of it happening it's been smoking or appliance faults.

 

[Iain Kay]

Sounds like a commercial usage in domestic premises, there is a lot of issues with that in intself. Maybe you need an office? Still say paper tiger.

It's a home lab which is an ever increasingly popular thing to have between IT pros.

It's a grey area because technically you're not working for anybody, you're teaching yourself, so commercial is a bit of a stretch in that sense.

In terms of what you're expecting from the power system, well in any of the places I've been previously I've been fine. Maybe I've just been lucky that they have had overkill power systems in place

 

[Des 56]

One socket circuit was and is very often found in installations
It could be a ring,there again radials were very prevalent

Before considering installing probably unnecessary additional circuits
Nowhere in this thread has the actual supply availability been mentioned
Where there is concern of loading issues,it would be my first consideration

 

[Iain Kay]

One socket circuit was and is very often found in installations
It could be a ring,there again radials were very prevalent

Before considering installing probably unnecessary additional circuits
Nowhere in this thread has the actual supply availability been mentioned
Where there is concern of loading issues,it would be my first consideration

Hey des,

Typically before I go plugging in my PC gear, I do a little checking of the circuits I have available and if I have good options to say split the load between two then I'll make a point of doing that.

In this instance, I came across the fact that literally everything is on the one circuit and was not happy to even begin plugging it in beyond what I've already got running.

I guess it may be sensible to attempt to get some real readings of power use of each of the appliances in action with a meter and get a full list together, at which point it would be clear that the load is not acceptable when combined.

I really don't want to have power cutting out all of the time on my gear though, lost too many PSUs to that and that's the best case, so for now I've really kept things to the minimum.

Can't be sure if we're talking rings or radials, but given it's a single 32A circuit to all of this I sure hope it's a ring.

 

[Toneyz]

What is a home lab & do you not have a smart meter that shows usage (ours does it shows wattage usage in real time)

 

[Darkwood]

Does this mean that if I can never flip the MCB back on, it's got an inrush current of 5x its rating when everything comes on?

That would be 160A... That can't be right!

It's seems you do not comprehend the term inrush fully, inrush is associated normally with inductive loads, purely resistive loads have negligible inrush, a typical motor will have an inrush up to 10x the full load current rating so yes it is correct that a 32amp mcb with a 3-5x trip curve will allow an inrush of upto 95amps without tripping and 95-160 amps where tripping may be intermittent.
Don't forget that when we talk about inrush that this is a very short period of time and is not an indication of how the device handles constant current flow.

 

[The Ghost]

It's a grey area because technically

In my view that is commercial scale use of a domestic supply "technicalities" aside, to put it another way it is not normal domestic use of a system designed for exclusively domestic use. If I were a landlord and the system was overloaded by your use I would be looking to you for reparations. The onus would be on you to rebutt the claim. But as has been stated it is highly unlikely you would overload the system anyway. Bear in mind there have been tenants before you and evidently there has not been a problem, if there is in your particular case it may be that you are using the system in a non normal way.

 

[The Ghost]

That can't be right

Are you sure it cannot be right. Can you tell us why?