Another good reason to do two radials instead of one ring - earth leakage - lots of electronics has mains filters that add to leakage, so total leakage on a big ring could get near tripping an RCD. Two radials on RCBOs is going to be less prone to nuisance tripping. Biggest reason not to do a ring is that a single fault will not be obvious as everything will still work.
I think that is also why UK wiring has to be tested every few years. A single fault on a ring is a fire hazard. There is also no obvious indication of such a fault. I have never heard of the electrical in house in the US that was checked unless there was an obvious problem, a renovation, or moving in/out. There is another reason to not have a ring, ground loops.
@@b2gills It doesn't HAVE to be tested unless you are a landlord that rent's the property. For everyone else it's only recommended. My wireing's still good after nearly 30 years, the only failure has been in the DNO's fuseholder.
@@Danechip Absolutely no because in case of a faulty equipment and you touch it you could die before the 50mA RCD trips. Fitting more RCBOs or RCDs is better.
@@laszlototh881 But 30mA could kill also. I see your point, but what %age have RCBO in the home, I don't. And i have only fitted 2 homes in RCBO. Everyone wants the cheaper option.
I like separate taps, the hot one reminds me that you should be careful as hot water is in fact very hot , and the cold one reminds you just how lucky you are to have running water .
Never mind rings or radials Tom. Go marry Betty! She's minted and owns so many properties! You can give up sparking completely and be a kept man. Sure, she's a bit dodgery and falls down stairs from time to time when the RCD trips and employs questionable electricians but she's a catch mate! I'm loving these tutorial videos. The comments and opinions are priceless.
I'm all for the radials over rings argument. Where you lose me is when you make assumptions about what a bedroom will be used for, and therefore about its supply requirements. Some people will use a spare bedroom as a workshop, or home office. Me for example! I'd have been annoyed if I'd had to call in an electrician to uprate that room's supply because the prior electrician had made dubious assumptions about its future use. You shouldn't get hung up on the name "bedroom". It's a room. It could be used for a multitude of different purposes.
Layman here. I wad thinking similar. Also rural properties. A lot of the properties here in Wales don't really have adequate heating or even no heating. Say if you have oil central heating, a lot of people may not want to pay £1000ish to fill the tank. May concern would be if you had two children's bedrooms both with panel heater and all their other stuff e.g tvs. You would soon run out of 16 amps. Thoughts?
Layman here. I wad thinking similar. Also rural properties. A lot of the properties here in Wales don't really have adequate heating or even no heating. Say if you have oil central heating, a lot of people may not want to pay £1000ish to fill the tank. May concern would be if you had two children's bedrooms both with panel heater and all their other stuff e.g tvs. You would soon run out of 16 amps. Thoughts?
I totally agree. I moved from UK to Switzerland and now find, the UK although has good standards (BSi), the techniques and technology so antiquated. We have only radials, on 13A breakers using 1.5mm cable. The sockets are only rated to 13A. Or we can have 16A breakers on 2.5mm cable and 16A sockets. In addition each house has 3phase. Our big appliances, ovens, hobs, washing machines are on 3phase (400v), with 16A per phase and 5x2.5mm cable. The sockets on each floor of my house are on a different phase to spread the load. Also, all cable is in conduit, the uniflex type. There are no ceiling roses with loops on them. A junction box will be in the ceiling or wall (with access panel), feed runs to the switch from the box, back to the box and then to the light. Switched lives can also come in other colours than brown, black and grey. We have purple,pink and orange. So you instantly know which switch is feeding which light from the cable colour. The wiring layout is so much more logical. New cables can be run through conduit. It aggrieves me no end to watch these 'expert YouTubing sparkies' clipping cable to joists in new builds. Our consumer units are also like an industrial unit. I have a unit which is about a metre tall with 6x12way DIN rails for breakers (it also houses the meter). Also backboxes are circular. Yes, round! and recesses in walls can be cut out with a drill, without having to make a square hole in brick. Of course screwless terminals are everywhere...I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Electrical installations in Finland are pretty much the same. One difference I would like to emphasize for UK electrical installations. We have no such thing at all as a fused spur. If we need to add a spur, it must be rated for the same current as the circuit to which it is added. This means that, we do not have fuses hidden behind the couch around the house, all circuit breakers are in the consumer unit.
Same here in Germany. Can also not get the reason behind the bare earth write which gets an green yellow sleeve, why are they not insulated like the rest? But less rcbo are used, they are mostly double wide and pretty pricy 30-40€
Isn't that big honki'n 32amp fuse the reason plugs in the UK has fuses as well? With a 13 amp spoke the fuse in the fusebox is all you need to keep cables from melting.
I can't say I find the story about the dodgy untrained electrician a very convincing argument against rings; they are probably going to screw things up whatever they do. That's just a tale of incompetence (and in those two first cases, a simple spur would have done the job - why anybody would create a ring within a ring, I don't know; that's just extra work). I would like to defend 32A circuits though, whether rings or radials. They are extremely useful in locations like workshops, utility rooms or kitchens, as you can plug in a couple of fairly high powered appliances and some smaller ones, wherever you like, without much danger of nuisance trips. When you plug in your electric kettle, microwave, and your coffee maker, and the dishwasher, and the iron and so on and not have to worry too much. People move appliances around; not the cooker of course, or likely the fridge/freezer (not that the latter draw a lot of power). However, there are plenty of portable appliances that do draw a lot. A kettle can take 3 kW as can a one-cup maker. A microwave can draw about 1.6 kW, the toaster might take another 1.5-2 kW, my electric fryer takes 2kW. Also, the washing machine and dishwasher have heaters that pull 2kW. Yes, you can run separate circuits in, but it all costs money and it limits flexibility, both on the semi-fixes appliances, and on the portable ones. The reason why 32A radials were common was to allow for the use of electric space heaters around the house before the days of central heating. It's still a useful backup if the central heating goes wrong, albeit separate 16A radials for each bedroom would do he same thing (some European countries provide a 16A circuit for both power and lighting in each room).
I agree I can not believe this guy I don’t think he has a clue, I don’t really write comments but watching his video was just shocking to me and you are completely correct there are more and more heavy load items being used especially in houses with big family’s where the kids stay at home longer as they can’t afford to buy a house, when I’m cooking I have the kettle boiling fryer on toaster microwave and food mixer like to see all that hold in on a radial then there’s volt drop and And distances blokes a joke, I’ve listed a few points above could of gone on and on at least there’s actually another electrician who knows what there actually talking about 👍
@@mr.t8830 I agree wholeheartedly with your points. However I can’t ever remember 32 amp radial circuits ever being the norm, aside from your cooker circuit?
It's usually kitchen fitters that go to Screwfix and buy half a dozen junction boxes, then proceed to butcher the kitchen ring when moving sockets around. 5 years later a job comes through to investigate an RCD tripping, you start taking sockets off in the kitchen and start finding either 1 cable at every socket, or half the sockets are fed off 1 spur. So if it were a radial, despite the kitchen fitter wiring all of his new sockets in stars and spurs, it would at least be protected by the correct sized CPD. Although you're probably still going to get faults later down the line. But as you said, it's far more flexible just to wire a kitchen ring and then not have to worry about what socket the kettle, toaster, washing machine etc. is plugged into. And it's also not our problem if the owner of the property wants to let some mong come in and hack the installation to pieces, should have got an electrician in to carry out the electrical works.
Couldn’t agree with you more, I just don’t see the argument against a ring unless you just can’t be bothered to do a bit more testing. Any argument that someone incompetent could cause problems could be levelled at any circuit and is the fault of the incompetent person not the circuit
Advantage of a ring wired in 2.5mm2 is lower volt drop across the circuit compared to a 4mm2 radial. Also easier to terminate 2 x 2.5mm2 than 2 x 4mm2 in a socket
As an american electrician, i've struggled to explain ring circuits to other american electricians. I get why you guys do it, but it is really hard for us to wrap our minds around :) Cheers from Knoxville Tennessee my friend!
I fully understand your struggle. Many Americans don't seem to have the brain power to be able to walk. I keep coming across cases where they don't undertand English.
@@zippymo672 Form Canada, but have watched a lot of U.S electricians, they have the NEC national electric code, in Canada we have the CEC Canadian electric code. That said some states or provinces might have or even local city's might have addendum to the code, but more often that falls on the building code side of things, and you have to check the building code as well when doing electrical work.
@@zippymo672 Most of the problems in the US are because the whole grid is a radial unlike the UK where our grid is a ring and secure from a total shutdown most of the time.
I have to strongly disagree here about whether 16A is enough for ground and other floors in most houses or at least I do without considering a lot of other factors that you don't mention here. I agree that most of the time it would be fine, but what happens if your gas heating breaks and it's winter? As this just happened to me I can tell you, you end up with 6 electric heaters heating your home until everything gets fixed, which in my case took 11 days. My house isn’t massive, it’s a 4 bed that is reasonably (though not brilliantly) insulated and fully double glazed, and over this period our smart meter was showing we were using around 60+KWh per day more electricity than normal and despite this, the house was still colder than normal in the rooms that didn't have electric heaters in them. If our house had been wired as you suggest here one 16a radial for ground and one for the upstairs where the bedrooms are we would have had to move out for the period. I have found most of your videos great but if someone follows your advice here and doesn’t think about what could happen if their heating brakes then if it does, they aren’t going to be happy when they find they can only run one heater per floor before the breakers trip.
FYI most railings removed in WWII were never actually used in the war effort - wrought iron had little use. It was actually a propaganda exercise to make people feel like they were supporting the war effort. Most of the realigns ended up dumped in the thames estuary.
I've read the same about the recycling drives we had in the USA. It was almost impossible to make use of the various formulations of rubber that were contributed and even the aluminum was too contaminated for use in making aircraft. Not that we've learned much from that; today, tons of plastic that would make great fuel for power generation is put on diesel barges and sent to third world countries where the majority that can't be recycled is simply dumped with much of it ending up floating in the oceans.
When we moved into our 1970s built 3bed detached house there was just one ring for all sockets, upstairs , downstairs including kitchen and an immersion on 13A fcu also off the ring. Radial for cooker and 2 lighting circuits . That was 4 circuits on a 6way Wilex rewirable board, TT (despite the supply being PME) with a VOELCB. As a sensible DIYer (this was early 1980s) I split the ring into two separate rings running legs back to the board and using 1 spare way for the 2nd ring, put in a new 2.5mm radial on 16A fuse for the immersion on the other spare way. Oh and got rid of the borrowed neutral on the landing 2 way. That installation lasted until 2011 when I had a proper spark in to do PIR (EICR in new money) and board change, testing of all circuits was all good except the Ze because of the TT, that was change to TNCS and new RCBO board, happy days. Some of us DIYers know what we are doing! Sometimes you are just stuck with rings!
Voltage drop is a problem with radials. 2.5mm radial on a 20A breaker will only get about 33 metres before reaching 11.5V drop. No diversity allowed on socket circuits either.
Totally agree....first thing I thought was voltage drop....I'm in the electronic field...and just looked at his drawing and thought....that's a bad idea!...I agree the current draw is not as big as it used to be...as products are more efficient and use less energy but we don't know what going to different in the future
Why not go up a size in your wire? Here in the States we use 12 gauge, 4.0 mm2, for sockets, excluding high current draw item like electric stoves or dryers, and 14 gauge, 2.5mm2, for dedicated lighting circuits.
@@mikecumbo7531 exactly this blokes an idiot I’m shocked he shouldn’t be trading making up rubbish and 4.0mm radials are fine but a 2.5mm ring will do the job and still cover more area at less cost and work absolutely fine in fact to cover more area with a ring we actually would step up to a 4.0mm
@@richardlyd7450 loads are defiantly not lower these days. A 100a incomer is the norm in a domestic property these days. Where 20 years ago it was 60A. We milk the grid these days!
@@mikecumbo7531 Much larger houses leading to much longer cable runs. I've asked very capable electricians with physics and maths degrees about 4mm cable to our loft extension with all conceivable power use, including microwave and kettle at kitchenette and calculations all came back that 2.5mm easily enough. I have conduit everywhere so changing cable would be easy
A ring may be safer since the earth cable is connected at both ends in a socket. if you have an earth break in a radial , every socket going forward is not earthed
This is where 'electricians' don't understand things. If I put a ring in, I don't cut wires at every socket, I bare the necessary length and fold it and ansert the folded bit. If it comes out, the rest of the ring is still intact. I've recently done a multi-voltage radial and this is how the CPC is wired. It's not broken in the circuit at all. The power wires are but at the end of the circuits, the socket is fitted with a neon proving connectivitiy through and at all the sockets on the chain. I decided to break these wires to show a disconnect at any intermediate socket - on all 3 phases.
@@ethernet0 true, but that's just ONE benefit of an RCD, the 32A down the earth wire will trip the RCD within 2 cycles so is hardly likely to be an issue in any way. A single 1.5mm² CPC is VERY unlikely to blow with 32A for such a short period and it's more than likely that the RCD will trip LONG before the MCB ever will.
Not using rings is a big step back to the past, my house had 15A radials, the rings are much better as the thinner cable is easier to get round the house. Also 4mm cable is much harder to get into sockets, round corners etc. I also have fitted 1mm lighting rings.
We install radials now predominately. Two radials for the kitchen plus the cooker. Then a radial up and down stairs typically but depends on the size of house and number of outlets. Normally just 2.5mm radials but depends on installation method.
Agreed, another reason was post WW11 large house were converted to bed sits, with no central heating or insulation, so often several 3 bar electric heaters were used on one floor.
I personally don’t like ring mains, I do radials for upstairs, downstairs Kitchens I do 2 radials - 1 for kitchen sockets above worktop & 20amp grid for undercounters
2 radials for me. If anything goes kaput on one side the other can still be used. I have done some in 4mm t&e with a 32A rcbo. With rings there are a lot more things which can go wrong. It's much easier to trace faults on radials 👍.
@@rayc1503 absolutely I use radials everywhere else, I can see the benefit of 2 radials for kitchens I might start doing the same. And Ive had enough of trying to fit 2 4mm in a socket tbf more of a pain in the ass than it's worth 😅 which is why I don't do 32a radials
Not only a great video - also great entertainment as well!! Very thought provoking. Whe I built my own house the regs were in their infancy and not very clear. Cable quality was poor sooo I put rings 'everywhere' 'cos you don't know who in the future is going to run what kit from what plug. Soo - lots of rings, derated CBs - result nothing gets over loaded / over heated... My money, my cable, nothing over loaded....
Repairing a ring by splitting to two radials is a quick fix, but potentially dangerous unless you know for sure exactly where the fault is and can isolate it from *both* ends, otherwise it could be a damaged cable at risk of shorting etc.
If you haven't isolated the faulty cable at both ends then you've not cleared the fault , nothing wrong with splitting a ring a dropping the overcurrent protection
True. I guess best way would be to disconnect one side of the ring at the breaker, see how many sockets it affects then at the last working socked disconnect both conductors going to the rest of the ring. Now do the same in the other direction. ...Then, so long as 2.5mm is enough for the number of sockets on both new radials split them onto their own breakers (to be double safe). That should cover all potential points of danger, make sure nothing is overloaded, and mean no live but damaged wires behind a wall anywhere.
You are absolutely right, with a radial circuit you will lose power to the sockets south of the fault. Time to start digging out the wall to find the fault
I recently fitted a eadial at my mums place. Stepdad built a conservatory and the old brick shed beside it is now being used as a utility room. So for ease and mainly laziness I fitted a radial. Didn;t see the need for such few items to be on a ring, plus I couldn;t be arsed to run a leg back to the DB which just costs more in cable that isn;t needed.
It seems you want to do away with rings due to people who don't know what they are doing mucking circuits up. If you don't know what you are doing leave it alone
Tom, video suggestion, please do one on pipe bonding and when you need it and when you don't, it's purpose and why it was introduced. Really interested to see if what I understand and believe is correct.
I have just completed a rewire of a house, all radials except for the kitchen! I used a ring for the kitchen because of high energy appliances above counter, e.g sous vide, fryer, kettle, toaster. Also because of the cost of buying 4mm over 2.5mm at my local CEF. Every thing else was on 16A radials, 1 for each room for ease of testing, installing and safer in the event of a fault IMO. The house was being lived in and it was convenient to complete 1 room at a time using this method. 11/10 would recommend.
By the way, there is a lot of home grown Cowboys and Cheap Clueless developers , so pointing the finger at Shlep and Kovak (Real people's names) is a bit inappropriately discriminatory!
Radials are possible today because distribution boards/consumer units/fuse boxes have got so much bigger and cleverer. A typical domestic fuse box in the 40s and 50s had 4 rewireable porcelain fuses and that was it. The logical weaknesses with radials is that they can require more cable and often utilise a connection or junction box somewhere inaccessible to distribute power over a hub and spur network. In your example, Schlepp and Kovac should have run a simple spur from one of the ring main sockets to the new socket Betty had her heart set on. This is, AFAIK, legitimate within the regs?
Kitchen - are you in the real world ? By the time you have the oven, hob, dishwasher, clothes washer, kettle, microwave and 6-slot toaster going, MCB replaced by a nail you'd have a warm glow coming from the walls where the cable's buried ! Incidentally, my dishwasher would draw just over 20A at full power.
Yeah agreed, a ring in a kitchen is still recommended in my opinion. The chances of having the dish washer, kettle and toaster on at the same time is actually quite high. You can't put each socket on its own radial! 😂
Is UK really fine with running heavy stuff like oven, hob, washers, etc all on a single wire with more sockets? I think in the rest of the world this stuff would just be on a separate lines with separate breakers.
I like the idea and justification of sockets radials. But for kitchens thinking the load could be a challenge. If 4mm cable needed which faceplates have big enough terminals for 2 x 4mm T+E to be connected. I havnt tried it but if others have recommendations I will give it a go in my workshop first.
Always wondered why no manufacturer ever came up with ring-specific RCBOs that have separate L1 L2 & N1 N2 connectors that continually monitor continuity in the ring and trip if continuity is lost on either conductor. I'm sure if such a thing were invented it'd quickly become incorporated into future regs and they'd corner the market.
For one thing cost plus the extra terminals needed would be an issue with size. Also measuring continuity on an energised circuit while simultaneously feeding power to L1 and L2 is significantly non-trivial.
Same seems like it could be done using something like our CDs ( speech to text face slap RCD's) do. In the US were very accustomed to this concept of dule sized breakers since single slice is 120 and double is 240 until you get into the higher voltage phase panels... I don't see why it couldn't be a double space special RCBO. Although you would run into a type tested issue as each manufacture would have to make one or test for compatibility. So no one single company unless they tested for compatibility on all brands hmm. Seems like with a current sensor coil you would have hopefully somewhere approximately the same current draw on either leg. Or you could put a "filter" between the two legs and send a pulsed Digital signal on one and receive it on the other.
You'd need to transformer isolate your L1 and L2 feeds from the main incoming Live which at 32A is going to be a substantial transformer, then you'd need to superimpose a signal onto the mains to detect continuity so not really very practical.
@@mfx1 yes you need a 32 amp at least transformer to do it actively. I'm thinking possibly like how an RCD uses current sense coils just two of them one on each line? Or since it digitally and then use an inductor to block the digital signal interfering with each side and past the breaker. Sort of how ethernet over power lines or those circuit tracer things work.
Ok. That was great. What I don't see is what the advantage of running a radial is. If a broken ring can be repaired so easily then that to me is a big score for the ring final over the radial circuit. So again what are the pros for installing a radial?
Imo. It should be down to choice ( customers) choice ..I retire this year and for years I have done ring circuits , radials as well ..give the customers the choice , I Allways Have …
In a kitchen if your cooker, fridge and freezer are on separate circuits, but you could still have washing machine, dishwasher, dryer, air fryer, microwave, toaster and kettle all plugged in. You could easily have 3 of those things on at once totaling 30 amps.
I disagree, rings can be useful and if you are fitting radials on say a 5 bed house then the consumer unit would have more than 14 ways. At the end of the day it is down to cost and maybe Mr Nagy's customers have loads of money, but some customers do not and installing rings can be cost effective and keep the number of ways down.
@@geoffball5803 Really? Tell that to someone buying a 5 bed terrace in Hartlepool for £65k, also that statement would make the alternative way incorrect which simply isn't the case.
Nope. Rings have many advantages over radials - longer permitted circuit length in terms of voltage drop, more flexibility in installation reference methods, better diversity, smaller conductor size, less of the worlds resources wasted. The reasons you give for disliking them are: Some people don't know how to install them properly (that would only be a problem if it applies to you), and :You don't need them cos you're going to install a radial for every single kitchen or utility appliance (an absurd idea, one ring will do them all, bar the cooker). And why do you think that a lower rated circuit is somehow safer?
Agree with most of this, but as for the last part - is it not safer to install the lowest rating protection you can for the demand, so in the event of overload conditions it trips quicker? E.g. a faulty 13A plug top oven, which failed to blow the plug top fuse would trip a 16a dedicated breaker quicker than a 32a.
Over here in France we do 16amp radials for 8 sockets on 2.5mm. 20amp for heaters on 2.5mm (1 per 20amp). 10amp radials for lights on 1.5mm... 32amps are generaly only used for induction plates, ovens and pretty big AC units
I don't think you have thought this through the practicalities. (1) A ring main will give an element of convenience should any part of the ring be broken so that not all the system will go down. (2) A 2.5mm section is difficult enough to manipulate a connection in the various sockets. If you consider ever plugging in devices at the limit of the MCB (32a) then you would need to use a heavier cable for any spur that is not on a ring. Copper wire will not tolerate much bending whether single or multi strand and the risk of a breakage is much higher with thicker conductors. (3) Spurs can be added to a ring without losing end to end testing. for the whole ring. If you thing I am misguided pleas say.
The fact that a broken conductor in ring circuit would have no effect on its operation, is the one major flaw in the system. The ring circuit is able to operate safely on a circuit breaker that is rated higher than the current carrying capacity of the cable. This is because there are effectively two conductors sharing the current load back to the circuit breaker from any one point (ring). If the ring is broken, the conductor size is then effectively halved and becomes underrated for the circuit breaker and could lead to an overloading of the cable situation. This is why regular testing of ring final circuits is necessary. Despite this drawback, the long historical use of the ring circuit has shown that it’s flexibility outweighs the relatively small and manageable safety risk.
@@demonkey123 I totally agree and I thought I got that clear. I assumed that if there was a break on a ring circuit either half would be ok to carry a 2.5 mm wire 32 amp load on a 230v and I am aware there is a limit to the length of a typical ring of 2.5mm wire for that very reason - please do correct me if I'm wrong.
@@Cruner62 In optimal conditions (RM-C) the maximum current carrying capacity of a 2.5mm2 conductor is 27A rendering it underrated for 32A protection. A spur wired from a ring (intact ring) in 2.5 is deemed acceptable as the maximum number of accessories is one, limiting it to 13A in the case of a singe socket or 20A in the case of an un-switched spur or 26A in the case of a double socket. In the 3rd case, care should be taken to observe the current limiting factors of the cable installation method i.e. 2.5mm cables installed in a steel conduit would be reduced to a maximum current carrying capacity of 20A. This would prohibit the installation of a double socket on a single spur.
Totally agree Tom, the only issue I find with installing radials is that the terminals on many wiring accessories struggle to take 2 x 4mm conductors, let alone a third if you want to add a spur.
You'd only need 4mm for a 32A radial - 2.5 is the other "standard" arrangement for a 20A radial. And like Tom said, if you really did need 32A capacity, probably best split some load off on another circuit.
@@simonparkinson1053 Good point well made. The fact that I just automatically assumed a sockets circuit would have 32A capacity just proves the point that this is an ingrained habit with many UK sparks.
7:30 old rings - 5A up lighting, 5A down lighting, 30A up sockets ring 30A down sockets ring and 30A cooker feed - likely with a a socket fitted to the cooker switch. 15A immersion heater, 15A bathroom wall radiant heater. 15A spare.
@@demonkey123 Sounds like you recognise that 'finger-print' ;) We (the fusebox and I) laugh at people with MCBs, RCDs, RCBOs etc. etc. My 5A fuses are strong enough to blow holes in lightbulb caps without flinching. Although, I ought to admit, I've not examined the fuses for genuineness but those I've seen have been correct... However, we have a 20A GEC switch feeding outbuildings - never been in that box but recently felt the mech was due lubrication - so examined the copper wire where the fuse should be. Switch states 20A and as I recently found some 10A fusewire in the garden (yes, some prefer growing weed), it now has 2 pieces of that in it.
Honestly it depends on the use case scenario and cost. 2x RCBO's + 2 radials may end up more expensive than one 32 amp ring, also if you've go multiple daughters if you only have a 20 amp radial and they happen to both be getting ready at the same time I have been called out to radials tripping out due to overload. In the end it comes down to the practicality of installation and although I would love to just fit radials expense is a thing and so many customers don't want a separate circuit for dish washer and white goods they just want a 32 amp kitchen ring because it's all in the same place. Regardless of advice or trying to explain, there is also the grief these days of trying to run a 32 amp kitchen radial with USB sockets and box depths required for 4mm cable.
I wanted separate circuits for kitchen appliances but advised against. Do have separate circuits for boiler, hob, two ovens. Wanted them for fridge, freezer, washing machine, tumbler dryer. I put in the back boxes and have conduit everywhere so could change and simple thread cable through to where needed
Yep - Exeter here (well, Newton Abbot, but I work in Exeter). The same is true all around Southernhay - you can see the remains of the old railings in the granite kerb stones where they cut them off.
My grandfather taught me about rings when I started my apprenticeship. He started his career in the UK then moved to Aus in his 20s. Seemed pretty redundant in modern times, we've never had em here in Australia.
I think it's good that on a ring you can spur a socket off once for every socket that is on the ring. Not sure if you can do that with radials, never done it.
There's a housing development around my way that was built in the 70s, concrete floors. One ring final in each house, running upstairs and all downstairs sockets were spurs off from it! Radials you can in effect have a "tree" circuit, but then that is extra work when it comes to testing as you will have to test multiple "ends". Though with socket outlets you'd be testing all points anyway.
I don't know what the regs say, but safety-wise there's no reason you can't run unlimited spurs off a radial as everything is protected by a suitable breaker. The problem with spurs off a ring is a 32A breaker exceeds the rating of a single run of 2.5mm cable.
@@mikeselectricstuff Thing is 2.5mm T&E isn't rated at 32amp for a ring anyway I think it's rated at 26amp. The theory is the load is halfed from each leg. Dodgey area is rings lol
We originally had a ring, but forced into having a two radials due to a damaged cable. We didn't upgrade the cable, left the existing one from the ring circuit.
Rings are great for home owners. Can plug in lots of heaters if your boiler fails. However electricians have to test them it takes lots of time, hurts their head, and if it fails they get really grumpy having to fault find.
Not really convinced that 20A radial is enough for kitchen sockets - I frequently have dishwasher and washing machine on together, I know they are not heating the water all the time but at the start of the cycle they will be, so we're at at least 20A already - before I've made my toast or boiled the kettle :-)
Most kitchens here in the us we would have 2-3 radials. And washing machine, dryer and dishwasher, oven, fridge freezers would be on their own dedicated circuits. Of course kitchens here are larger but usually they are 20amp radials.
@@tncorgi92 Yes it isn't great - larger homes here quite often have a utility room for that sort of thing, but for many houses and flats the kitchen is the typical location - as it has the plumbing and drainage.
A lot of the properties I work in on our council contract have 20A rcbo's protecting the rings in 2.5, and 32A wired in 4mm (also rings). That's what they spec
Rings are without a doubt the most backwards, UK specific thing I've ever seen. And I am constantly surprised that people still insist on installing them new and maintaining them. In Australia we have the same operating voltage and frequency. With similar maximum current demands in areas like kitchens and laundries. But ring circuits aren't even a consideration. In fact your average domestic sparky wouldn't even know what the fuck it is. The generally accepted approach is to have the laundry and kitchen on different, radial socket outlet circuits and that's it. Blows my mind that people cant evolve to improved circuit arrangements. -No fuse spurs -No maintaining a ring to add 1 socket. infact if you find a power circuit cable in the roof you can just Jbox and branch off for a new socket -fewer possible faults Shits wild
@@curtisj2165 That means that the cable between the branch point and the socket would be underprotected by the circuit protection. How backwards. Imagine a damaged appliance or a partial A-N fault. The cable would fucken cook.
@@trmindustries.2549 not necessarily, 2.5mm cable is rated at 26 amps and the circuit is protected by a 32 amp circuit breaker. As Thomas said you could downgrade to a 16 or 20 amp breaker, and life would be all good
You say "the reason we used rings was they use less copper". That seems like a it's still a very valid reason to use them today. Second reason to use rings, the voltage drop at the furthest socket from the CU is halved compared to a radial.
Two lightning circuits and three socket? More like one of each back in the day. I wasn't convinced by the argument that the service cutout might be only 40A I can't say I've seen one that small and it would only apply to a miniscule number of properties. Radials over rings? Well rings have served us well for 70 years of they're not idiot proof but what is?
Yes indeed, many UK houses up until the late 70s with only one ring. Definitely the case in my childhood home - two 5A lighting circuits, one 30A ring and a 30A cooker radial. That house had no central heating so the ring was supplying free standing electric heaters and also an immersion heater for hot water. It worked, the fuse never failed but then again a 30A rewireable fuse can run well over 30A for hours before it melts.
@@rossthompson1635 You are making the case for doing away with rings! The fuse just will not blow even if the cable is overloaded, house will burn down. It could run an electric shower and not blow on 32a. Absolute gift to cowboys and DIY, it dosnt blow, works fine job done. They are not safe.
@@jondonnelly3 Well yes, certainly true with old rewireable fuses. I'm a bit happier with a ring on a 32A breaker, but yes - if the ring continuity is poor then a section could easily be overloaded.
What circuits do you install, the appropriate circuits, . Until you been in a building and spoke to the client and you know what needs to be installed then you select the appropriate circuits. These things are never cut and dry. This is the same argument people have with lightning , 2 plate or 3 plate , if I'm installing down lighters then it's 2 plate , if it's pendants then it's 3 plate . everything has its pros and cons.
I always look at installations from a future maintenance point of view which is why in domestic rewires the upstairs and downstairs sockets we do are rings on 16A/20A. Boiler dedicated 10A radial. Kitchen appliances 20A ring and kitchen sockets 20A ring. The circuit has the correct ocpd from design stage taking into account Shlep & Co's future incompetence which provides a safer installation. Unless of course Betty Crocker croaks it because of shoddy Shleps modifications it in which case it's end of the road for Shlep....
House built 1949. Wylex 4 way. 1 lights, 1 sockets (ring), 1 boiler, 1 cooker. That's it. I upgraded/dragged the system up 3 years ago. Did a quick 'tickle' test @250 and it said, and? Well impressed for integrity of old cables (still sent them off to retire though)
If the electricity is already flowing around a ring, appliances will turn on quicker then having to wait for the electricity to flow all the way from the consumer unit. 😜
Electricity travels very slowly, if you imagine a tube full of marbles if pushed from one end the marble at the other end pops out, can push marble in slowly and pops out almost instantly
Electron flow from one atom of copper to the next travels at or near to the spead of light which is 186282.3959 miles per second. That is quite fast. Any effect on a ring final circuit would be, well, not much!
@@johndavies4919 Actually electrons are massive particles so obviously they cannot travel the same speed as massless photons. They travel about 90% the speed of light with 220,000 electron-volts, to get an electron traveling 99.9% the speed of light you need ridiculous amounts of energy (11,000,000eV) This is one of the reasons why fibreoptic internet is faster than electrons & copper!
I support 4mm radials, 32A rcbo. Sockets I find do not have large enough terminals to spur off, once you have a feed in and feed to next socket. No room for a branch if needed.
I love the "Betty Crocker" references because now when I'm in the grocery store going down the baking aisle I just laugh. No one else knows why of course.
The one benefit of ring circuits is that you can eliminate a compromised leg and get a circuit working without causing any damage, something I do quite a lot. No ones ever been able to explain to me why a ring uses less copper (in a normal domestic situation). The equivalent 2 radials instead of a ring will use one less leg of cable than a ring. I know you can get bigger circuits with a ring but is it really a problem in a normal house? Radials take up more circuit breakers but I agree its a better payoff as you get better separation. A radial to every room should be the norm like it is in most countries.
One ring for the whole house and a standard plug and socket for everything was a big saving in materials compared to wiring from the 1930s and earlier. 1930s = many different incompatible plugs and sockets, multiple circuits with multiple fuses 1947 onwards = one ring circuit for the whole house, one fuse, one design of standard plug and socket for everything.
@@jwflame Is it that of a saving compared to 2 radials? 1 radial upstairs and 1 radial downstairs would use less cable? Assuming a separate circuit for cooking equipment
@@londontrada No. 1930s wiring was 1 circuit per socket in most cases. 6 sockets = 6 individual fuses for 6 individual circuits, and those sockets could be 2 amp, 5 amp, 15 amp and either 2 or 3 pin, all of which were totally incompatible. Some may have had 2 or 3 sockets per circuit for the lower ratings, but the whole concept of a radial with a large number of identical sockets didn't exist when rings were designed in the 1940s. 2x 20A radials will use less cable than a 32A ring, but that comparison wasn't valid at the time.
Some great points and in agreement but was surprised ‘load balancing’ wasn’t one of the key points. I’m not familiar with kitchens with dedicated circuits for fridge, freezer, washer or tumble dryer but for the many many ring circuits out there, several high current appliances have potential to be placed anywhere in the kitchen and potentially exceed the maximum current carrying capacity by simply following the path of least resistance. So I think the idea of a couple dedicated appliance radials is decent, but a 4mm ring would be safer in modern bigger kitchens.
Wait till AFDD's are mandated in Amendment 2. At £120 a breaker you will have no chance in winning any work if your having to put more circuits. Rings are very useful for kitchen unless you have a separate utility area for washer/dryer, the most dangerous thing about a ring circuit is the fact that you can have a cable break that can turn it into a radial and you wont necessarily have a clue, the other problems around DIY and non competent people working on electrics doing silly things I dont think you can regulate for idiots that should not be touching electrics unless you want to go down the route of only electricians can touch electrics, but too many people have a go hero's, only the other day found a cable where some plonker had used the CPC as a permanent live on a switch cable so had neutral as neutral, line and switched line and cpc as permanent live. Nothing wrong with a ring as long as idiots don't mess with it but as the example above shows, even going to radial does not solve any issues.
AFDD's dont work with a ring circuit. Electricity follows the path of least resistance, its not going to arc across the fault, its going round the other leg instead
@@MrJTJINX There are different types of arc's Serial and parrallel.. The AFDD's are designed to allow or things like light switches, they dont trip on a one off arc, they are looking for a continuous arc.. Don't get me wrong it seems mad to fit them at the source of the circuit so it trips the entire circuit, surely it would be better to have them in every appliance as I agree thats where the issues are more prevalent... But there are too make of the big players that would lobby against it...
It seems to me that while radials certainly have some benefits 16 amps is not enough current in many situations. You mentioned a separate circuit for the sockets in a kitchen but a kettle alone would be maybe 10A so a toaster and microwave couldn't be used at the same time. A couple of hair dyers on at the same time could trip a bedrooms circuit too. I think to make it work you would need more circuits than you suggest, possibly one per bedroom and quite a few for a kitchen, while that may sound excessive it would only mean a larger consumer unit and a bit of extra cable and would also make fault finding easier. Anyway it's an interesting discussion.
My kitchen layout means I could easily have these on at the same time Kettle 3000W/13A - Toaster 1500W/6.5A - Microwave 1200W/5A = 25A Will you have then on at the same time? Beans on Toast and a cup of tea?
I'm with you on that, although it is possible to install 32A radials using 4mm^2 cable. It can be a bit awkward as many power sockets only have terminals which can take 2 x 4mm cables, so it can be a bit awkward to run 3 cables into one. nb. I can add a 2 kW electric fryer to the list, and my microwave draws about 1.5 kW, and it can act as a 3 kW convection oven.
You make lots of assumptions re what items are on separate circuits, Most of mine are on the power ring including the lower sockets of the house and only the cooker is on its own radial. Yet a lot depends upon the appliances used,the kitchen is one place where power-hungry machines might threaten an overload.
To add another point to your last point, damaged cable between two sockets, circuit gets re energised and all sockets work again, but are then sat on a 32a mcb / rcbo, overloading the now two radials may not trip the mcb, cable melts as ccc less than 32a 😫
Hi Tom , good video,, Another Topic : schneider light switches with loop for neutrals / cpc , haven’t seen any other brand doing it, Therefore i only install schneider Topic 2 : should be all bring neutrals to switches? I think that makes more sense
Hager sollysta also do looped in neutrals. Bringing neutrals to switch terminals future proofs the installation for smart accessories. More and more customers want smart control of their appliances and lighting.
Great educational & common sense video and especially was waiting for outtakes, excellent! Suggestion: Maybe as next topic could you why & explain and pro & con of single vs three phases in a house would or wouldn’t benefit from past, present and future if any.
Begins to make sense with the price of the FuseBox RCBOs. At a fraction over £10 each, you can easily sell the benefit, whereas at £30 each you'd struggle. I did a job a couple of years ago where the client wanted a separate radial for every downstairs room. No problem selling that job!
in my country we dont use rings, but for example when doing outdoor lighting, we might bury the cable as a ring but only connect one end of it, leaving us a second chance in case of cable fault in the future, getting the reliability of being able to split a ring on a radial
@@Rich10000 ref method 100 & 102 can still be used in the configuration you have mentioned. Ring circuits are still totally fit for purpose in my opinion. 4mm 32a radials are only good for about 30m in length until you run the risk of exceeded max ZS values.
@@tomorichard I agree. Max surface area normally for rings is 100m^2 and for radials is 75m^2 so rings can cover more area. I think it can change a tad under conductor csa or if its lighting or power cant remember
100% agree. Stop fitting rings. The copper saving in new installs was real; but by the time we were building new to the hew standards the war was over. Just as significant was re-wiring existing property. Typically pre-war each room would have 1 × 15A outlet. One radial for each, sometimes one for each floor floor. Re-using those and adding just a little new cable you could turn them into a 30A ring without having to tear everything up.
Another good reason to do two radials instead of one ring - earth leakage - lots of electronics has mains filters that add to leakage, so total leakage on a big ring could get near tripping an RCD. Two radials on RCBOs is going to be less prone to nuisance tripping.
Biggest reason not to do a ring is that a single fault will not be obvious as everything will still work.
I think that is also why UK wiring has to be tested every few years. A single fault on a ring is a fire hazard. There is also no obvious indication of such a fault.
I have never heard of the electrical in house in the US that was checked unless there was an obvious problem, a renovation, or moving in/out.
There is another reason to not have a ring, ground loops.
@@b2gills It doesn't HAVE to be tested unless you are a landlord that rent's the property. For everyone else it's only recommended. My wireing's still good after nearly 30 years, the only failure has been in the DNO's fuseholder.
Wouldn't a 50mA RCD make more sense in this day and age?
@@Danechip Absolutely no because in case of a faulty equipment and you touch it you could die before the 50mA RCD trips. Fitting more RCBOs or RCDs is better.
@@laszlototh881 But 30mA could kill also. I see your point, but what %age have RCBO in the home, I don't.
And i have only fitted 2 homes in RCBO. Everyone wants the cheaper option.
Rings feel like the electrical equivalent of those old plumbing systems which required separate taps as the hot water wasn’t potable.
I like separate taps, the hot one reminds me that you should be careful as hot water is in fact very hot , and the cold one reminds you just how lucky you are to have running water .
@@andljoy Comment of the video.
Why would you drink hot water anyway
@@alexdevonport9377 I think you’ve misunderstood lmao
I'm not a plumber, however it is more hygienic to have drinking water separate from the hot water.
7:50 won't need 32 A upstairs - unless you have 2 3kW fires heating a couple of bedrooms while waiting to get the gas boiler fixed.
Never mind rings or radials Tom. Go marry Betty! She's minted and owns so many properties! You can give up sparking completely and be a kept man.
Sure, she's a bit dodgery and falls down stairs from time to time when the RCD trips and employs questionable electricians but she's a catch mate!
I'm loving these tutorial videos. The comments and opinions are priceless.
Sounds like she's got a lovely, large, brand new bedroom too!
I'm all for the radials over rings argument. Where you lose me is when you make assumptions about what a bedroom will be used for, and therefore about its supply requirements. Some people will use a spare bedroom as a workshop, or home office. Me for example! I'd have been annoyed if I'd had to call in an electrician to uprate that room's supply because the prior electrician had made dubious assumptions about its future use. You shouldn't get hung up on the name "bedroom". It's a room. It could be used for a multitude of different purposes.
Layman here. I wad thinking similar. Also rural properties. A lot of the properties here in Wales don't really have adequate heating or even no heating. Say if you have oil central heating, a lot of people may not want to pay £1000ish to fill the tank.
May concern would be if you had two children's bedrooms both with panel heater and all their other stuff e.g tvs. You would soon run out of 16 amps.
Thoughts?
Layman here. I wad thinking similar. Also rural properties. A lot of the properties here in Wales don't really have adequate heating or even no heating. Say if you have oil central heating, a lot of people may not want to pay £1000ish to fill the tank.
May concern would be if you had two children's bedrooms both with panel heater and all their other stuff e.g tvs. You would soon run out of 16 amps.
Thoughts?
I totally agree. I moved from UK to Switzerland and now find, the UK although has good standards (BSi), the techniques and technology so antiquated. We have only radials, on 13A breakers using 1.5mm cable. The sockets are only rated to 13A. Or we can have 16A breakers on 2.5mm cable and 16A sockets. In addition each house has 3phase. Our big appliances, ovens, hobs, washing machines are on 3phase (400v), with 16A per phase and 5x2.5mm cable. The sockets on each floor of my house are on a different phase to spread the load. Also, all cable is in conduit, the uniflex type. There are no ceiling roses with loops on them. A junction box will be in the ceiling or wall (with access panel), feed runs to the switch from the box, back to the box and then to the light. Switched lives can also come in other colours than brown, black and grey. We have purple,pink and orange. So you instantly know which switch is feeding which light from the cable colour. The wiring layout is so much more logical. New cables can be run through conduit. It aggrieves me no end to watch these 'expert YouTubing sparkies' clipping cable to joists in new builds. Our consumer units are also like an industrial unit. I have a unit which is about a metre tall with 6x12way DIN rails for breakers (it also houses the meter). Also backboxes are circular. Yes, round! and recesses in walls can be cut out with a drill, without having to make a square hole in brick. Of course screwless terminals are everywhere...I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Electrical installations in Finland are pretty much the same. One difference I would like to emphasize for UK electrical installations. We have no such thing at all as a fused spur. If we need to add a spur, it must be rated for the same current as the circuit to which it is added. This means that, we do not have fuses hidden behind the couch around the house, all circuit breakers are in the consumer unit.
Similar here. Except for all our outlets are 16A rated and the meter box is separate from the fuseboard .
It's a beautiful place, ABB shows the govt has not sold the industry out,
Same here in Germany. Can also not get the reason behind the bare earth write which gets an green yellow sleeve, why are they not insulated like the rest? But less rcbo are used, they are mostly double wide and pretty pricy 30-40€
Isn't that big honki'n 32amp fuse the reason plugs in the UK has fuses as well? With a 13 amp spoke the fuse in the fusebox is all you need to keep cables from melting.
I can't say I find the story about the dodgy untrained electrician a very convincing argument against rings; they are probably going to screw things up whatever they do. That's just a tale of incompetence (and in those two first cases, a simple spur would have done the job - why anybody would create a ring within a ring, I don't know; that's just extra work).
I would like to defend 32A circuits though, whether rings or radials. They are extremely useful in locations like workshops, utility rooms or kitchens, as you can plug in a couple of fairly high powered appliances and some smaller ones, wherever you like, without much danger of nuisance trips. When you plug in your electric kettle, microwave, and your coffee maker, and the dishwasher, and the iron and so on and not have to worry too much. People move appliances around; not the cooker of course, or likely the fridge/freezer (not that the latter draw a lot of power). However, there are plenty of portable appliances that do draw a lot. A kettle can take 3 kW as can a one-cup maker. A microwave can draw about 1.6 kW, the toaster might take another 1.5-2 kW, my electric fryer takes 2kW. Also, the washing machine and dishwasher have heaters that pull 2kW. Yes, you can run separate circuits in, but it all costs money and it limits flexibility, both on the semi-fixes appliances, and on the portable ones.
The reason why 32A radials were common was to allow for the use of electric space heaters around the house before the days of central heating. It's still a useful backup if the central heating goes wrong, albeit separate 16A radials for each bedroom would do he same thing (some European countries provide a 16A circuit for both power and lighting in each room).
I agree I can not believe this guy I don’t think he has a clue, I don’t really write comments but watching his video was just shocking to me and you are completely correct there are more and more heavy load items being used especially in houses with big family’s where the kids stay at home longer as they can’t afford to buy a house, when I’m cooking I have the kettle boiling fryer on toaster microwave and food mixer like to see all that hold in on a radial then there’s volt drop and And distances blokes a joke, I’ve listed a few points above could of gone on and on at least there’s actually another electrician who knows what there actually talking about 👍
@@mr.t8830 I agree wholeheartedly with your points. However I can’t ever remember 32 amp radial circuits ever being the norm, aside from your cooker circuit?
@@mr.t8830 He’s Hungarian bless ‘im. These European types would have radials all over the place if they got their own way!
It's usually kitchen fitters that go to Screwfix and buy half a dozen junction boxes, then proceed to butcher the kitchen ring when moving sockets around. 5 years later a job comes through to investigate an RCD tripping, you start taking sockets off in the kitchen and start finding either 1 cable at every socket, or half the sockets are fed off 1 spur. So if it were a radial, despite the kitchen fitter wiring all of his new sockets in stars and spurs, it would at least be protected by the correct sized CPD. Although you're probably still going to get faults later down the line.
But as you said, it's far more flexible just to wire a kitchen ring and then not have to worry about what socket the kettle, toaster, washing machine etc. is plugged into. And it's also not our problem if the owner of the property wants to let some mong come in and hack the installation to pieces, should have got an electrician in to carry out the electrical works.
Couldn’t agree with you more, I just don’t see the argument against a ring unless you just can’t be bothered to do a bit more testing. Any argument that someone incompetent could cause problems could be levelled at any circuit and is the fault of the incompetent person not the circuit
Advantage of a ring wired in 2.5mm2 is lower volt drop across the circuit compared to a 4mm2 radial. Also easier to terminate 2 x 2.5mm2 than 2 x 4mm2 in a socket
As an american electrician, i've struggled to explain ring circuits to other american electricians. I get why you guys do it, but it is really hard for us to wrap our minds around :) Cheers from Knoxville Tennessee my friend!
Do you have some sort of electrical wiring regulations for each state or is it just one that covers the whole of the USA?
@@zippymo672 Knowing them, BOTH !
I fully understand your struggle. Many Americans don't seem to have the brain power to be able to walk. I keep coming across cases where they don't undertand English.
@@zippymo672 Form Canada, but have watched a lot of U.S electricians, they have the NEC national electric code, in Canada we have the CEC Canadian electric code. That said some states or provinces might have or even local city's might have addendum to the code, but more often that falls on the building code side of things, and you have to check the building code as well when doing electrical work.
@@zippymo672 Most of the problems in the US are because the whole grid is a radial unlike the UK where our grid is a ring and secure from a total shutdown most of the time.
I have to strongly disagree here about whether 16A is enough for ground and other floors in most houses or at least I do without considering a lot of other factors that you don't mention here. I agree that most of the time it would be fine, but what happens if your gas heating breaks and it's winter?
As this just happened to me I can tell you, you end up with 6 electric heaters heating your home until everything gets fixed, which in my case took 11 days.
My house isn’t massive, it’s a 4 bed that is reasonably (though not brilliantly) insulated and fully double glazed, and over this period our smart meter was showing we were using around 60+KWh per day more electricity than normal and despite this, the house was still colder than normal in the rooms that didn't have electric heaters in them.
If our house had been wired as you suggest here one 16a radial for ground and one for the upstairs where the bedrooms are we would have had to move out for the period.
I have found most of your videos great but if someone follows your advice here and doesn’t think about what could happen if their heating brakes then if it does, they aren’t going to be happy when they find they can only run one heater per floor before the breakers trip.
also forgetting the fact if the wife or daughter turn on the hair dryer etc supplies will be overloaded.
FYI most railings removed in WWII were never actually used in the war effort - wrought iron had little use. It was actually a propaganda exercise to make people feel like they were supporting the war effort. Most of the realigns ended up dumped in the thames estuary.
maybe WW1 time and my railings are in a French field 3 foot down
I've read the same about the recycling drives we had in the USA. It was almost impossible to make use of the various formulations of rubber that were contributed and even the aluminum was too contaminated for use in making aircraft. Not that we've learned much from that; today, tons of plastic that would make great fuel for power generation is put on diesel barges and sent to third world countries where the majority that can't be recycled is simply dumped with much of it ending up floating in the oceans.
When we moved into our 1970s built 3bed detached house there was just one ring for all sockets, upstairs , downstairs including kitchen and an immersion on 13A fcu also off the ring. Radial for cooker and 2 lighting circuits . That was 4 circuits on a 6way Wilex rewirable board, TT (despite the supply being PME) with a VOELCB.
As a sensible DIYer (this was early 1980s) I split the ring into two separate rings running legs back to the board and using 1 spare way for the 2nd ring, put in a new 2.5mm radial on 16A fuse for the immersion on the other spare way. Oh and got rid of the borrowed neutral on the landing 2 way. That installation lasted until 2011 when I had a proper spark in to do PIR (EICR in new money) and board change, testing of all circuits was all good except the Ze because of the TT, that was change to TNCS and new RCBO board, happy days. Some of us DIYers know what we are doing! Sometimes you are just stuck with rings!
Slep and Kovak are getting a lot of free advertising on this channel …
They must be better than the two I know B.Ogit & S.Carpper
Voltage drop is a problem with radials. 2.5mm radial on a 20A breaker will only get about 33 metres before reaching 11.5V drop. No diversity allowed on socket circuits either.
Totally agree....first thing I thought was voltage drop....I'm in the electronic field...and just looked at his drawing and thought....that's a bad idea!...I agree the current draw is not as big as it used to be...as products are more efficient and use less energy but we don't know what going to different in the future
Why not go up a size in your wire? Here in the States we use 12 gauge, 4.0 mm2, for sockets, excluding high current draw item like electric stoves or dryers, and 14 gauge, 2.5mm2, for dedicated lighting circuits.
@@mikecumbo7531 exactly this blokes an idiot I’m shocked he shouldn’t be trading making up rubbish and 4.0mm radials are fine but a 2.5mm ring will do the job and still cover more area at less cost and work absolutely fine in fact to cover more area with a ring we actually would step up to a 4.0mm
@@richardlyd7450 loads are defiantly not lower these days. A 100a incomer is the norm in a domestic property these days. Where 20 years ago it was 60A. We milk the grid these days!
@@mikecumbo7531 Much larger houses leading to much longer cable runs.
I've asked very capable electricians with physics and maths degrees about 4mm cable to our loft extension with all conceivable power use, including microwave and kettle at kitchenette and calculations all came back that 2.5mm easily enough.
I have conduit everywhere so changing cable would be easy
Brilliant video, very well explained! Still a fan of a ring though just for the flexibility when you get a damaged cable!
A ring may be safer since the earth cable is connected at both ends in a socket. if you have an earth break in a radial , every socket going forward is not earthed
I hear you but how many times has an earth (CPC) come out of terminals and is not continuous on an r2 test. Just as much chance on radial as a ring.
This is where 'electricians' don't understand things. If I put a ring in, I don't cut wires at every socket, I bare the necessary length and fold it and ansert the folded bit. If it comes out, the rest of the ring is still intact.
I've recently done a multi-voltage radial and this is how the CPC is wired. It's not broken in the circuit at all. The power wires are but at the end of the circuits, the socket is fitted with a neon proving connectivitiy through and at all the sockets on the chain. I decided to break these wires to show a disconnect at any intermediate socket - on all 3 phases.
@@TooOldToScrum say someone screws the earth or goes through it with a nail and breaks it, not just down to the installer
so when the phase shorts to earth, you will be putting 32A into an earth cable not suited to handle this much current.
@@ethernet0 true, but that's just ONE benefit of an RCD, the 32A down the earth wire will trip the RCD within 2 cycles so is hardly likely to be an issue in any way. A single 1.5mm² CPC is VERY unlikely to blow with 32A for such a short period and it's more than likely that the RCD will trip LONG before the MCB ever will.
Not using rings is a big step back to the past, my house had 15A radials, the rings are much better as the thinner cable is easier to get round the house. Also 4mm cable is much harder to get into sockets, round corners etc. I also have fitted 1mm lighting rings.
but 4mm cable should not be used to connect sockets at all. Should have split 4mm cable into 2.5mm or 1.5mm first and then to the sockets.
We install radials now predominately. Two radials for the kitchen plus the cooker.
Then a radial up and down stairs typically but depends on the size of house and number of outlets. Normally just 2.5mm radials but depends on installation method.
You will be f****d if there is ever a fault in the middle of those radial circuits
Great new video series! This was really interesting. Could you please do a video one what DIYers are and are not allowed to do in their own homes.
Agreed, another reason was post WW11 large house were converted to bed sits, with no central heating or insulation, so often several 3 bar electric heaters were used on one floor.
2:48 "we don't have that shortage anymore"...how 2021 is going...I wouldn't be so sure 😂
There's been talk of copper shortages, if Demand goes up for all these electric cars & charging infrastructures.
Have you priced copper recently?
@@JimWhitaker I'm no sparky, just enjoy the content though 😂
@@NOWThatsRichy Buy gold and copper. Too late gold price shot up. ...
As the camera pans camera left at the intro and the white board comes into view... I literally said out loud "God not the whiteboard".
I personally don’t like ring mains, I do radials for upstairs, downstairs
Kitchens I do 2 radials - 1 for kitchen sockets above worktop & 20amp grid for undercounters
Actually really helpful! Thanks and great diagram (the smiley face was amazing art :) )
I only use rings in kitchens, I really dislike rings however I'm always paranoid about the amount of demand in a kitchen so I'll chuck a ring in there
2 radials for me. If anything goes kaput on one side the other can still be used. I have done some in 4mm t&e with a 32A rcbo. With rings there are a lot more things which can go wrong. It's much easier to trace faults on radials 👍.
@@rayc1503 absolutely I use radials everywhere else,
I can see the benefit of 2 radials for kitchens I might start doing the same.
And Ive had enough of trying to fit 2 4mm in a socket tbf more of a pain in the ass than it's worth 😅 which is why I don't do 32a radials
In Ireland your not aloud to put rings in a kitchen,
It's interesting to see how other countries do their electrical. Here we just put a separate breaker for every big appliance.
@@rayc1503 unless your 4mm radial was clipped direct then it was undersized for the protective device.
Not only a great video - also great entertainment as well!! Very thought provoking.
Whe I built my own house the regs were in their infancy and not very clear. Cable quality was poor sooo I put rings 'everywhere' 'cos you don't know who in the future is going to run what kit from what plug. Soo - lots of rings, derated CBs - result nothing gets over loaded / over heated...
My money, my cable, nothing over loaded....
Repairing a ring by splitting to two radials is a quick fix, but potentially dangerous unless you know for sure exactly where the fault is and can isolate it from *both* ends, otherwise it could be a damaged cable at risk of shorting etc.
If you haven't isolated the faulty cable at both ends then you've not cleared the fault , nothing wrong with splitting a ring a dropping the overcurrent protection
True.
I guess best way would be to disconnect one side of the ring at the breaker, see how many sockets it affects then at the last working socked disconnect both conductors going to the rest of the ring. Now do the same in the other direction.
...Then, so long as 2.5mm is enough for the number of sockets on both new radials split them onto their own breakers (to be double safe).
That should cover all potential points of danger, make sure nothing is overloaded, and mean no live but damaged wires behind a wall anywhere.
You would have to do this to clear the fault anyway
You’d have to know where the fault is or one side of the new radial would just trip still…. Lol.
You are absolutely right, with a radial circuit you will lose power to the sockets south of the fault. Time to start digging out the wall to find the fault
Been saying this for years.👍Well done for highlighting this .
I recently fitted a eadial at my mums place. Stepdad built a conservatory and the old brick shed beside it is now being used as a utility room. So for ease and mainly laziness I fitted a radial. Didn;t see the need for such few items to be on a ring, plus I couldn;t be arsed to run a leg back to the DB which just costs more in cable that isn;t needed.
Different approaches work for different situations, it’s not a reason to completely write off the ring circuit though
12:11 "hang on a minute there's a fault on this Ca-hahahahha.. *hysterical laughter continues* . 🤣👍🏼
I was always a believer in the rings.. but now you have planted radials in my brain. I think John 'JW' Ward follows your principles as well!
Yes but JW is a lecturer. He’s not a spark. Thank god 😆
Thanks for releasing this video a month before the year ends !!
It seems you want to do away with rings due to people who don't know what they are doing mucking circuits up. If you don't know what you are doing leave it alone
Just joined… loving the content
Tom, video suggestion, please do one on pipe bonding and when you need it and when you don't, it's purpose and why it was introduced.
Really interested to see if what I understand and believe is correct.
I have just completed a rewire of a house, all radials except for the kitchen!
I used a ring for the kitchen because of high energy appliances above counter, e.g sous vide, fryer, kettle, toaster. Also because of the cost of buying 4mm over 2.5mm at my local CEF.
Every thing else was on 16A radials, 1 for each room for ease of testing, installing and safer in the event of a fault IMO.
The house was being lived in and it was convenient to complete 1 room at a time using this method.
11/10 would recommend.
All RCBOs.
By the way, there is a lot of home grown Cowboys and Cheap Clueless developers , so pointing the finger at Shlep and Kovak (Real people's names) is a bit inappropriately discriminatory!
I agree, it really struck me as being ignorant and racist.
Radials are possible today because distribution boards/consumer units/fuse boxes have got so much bigger and cleverer. A typical domestic fuse box in the 40s and 50s had 4 rewireable porcelain fuses and that was it. The logical weaknesses with radials is that they can require more cable and often utilise a connection or junction box somewhere inaccessible to distribute power over a hub and spur network. In your example, Schlepp and Kovac should have run a simple spur from one of the ring main sockets to the new socket Betty had her heart set on. This is, AFAIK, legitimate within the regs?
Kitchen - are you in the real world ? By the time you have the oven, hob, dishwasher, clothes washer, kettle, microwave and 6-slot toaster going, MCB replaced by a nail you'd have a warm glow coming from the walls where the cable's buried !
Incidentally, my dishwasher would draw just over 20A at full power.
Outstnding response...spot on.
Yeah agreed, a ring in a kitchen is still recommended in my opinion. The chances of having the dish washer, kettle and toaster on at the same time is actually quite high. You can't put each socket on its own radial! 😂
Good shout…utility room on radials can cause overload issues as well once the washing machine and tumble dryer are running together
Is UK really fine with running heavy stuff like oven, hob, washers, etc all on a single wire with more sockets?
I think in the rest of the world this stuff would just be on a separate lines with separate breakers.
I like the idea and justification of sockets radials. But for kitchens thinking the load could be a challenge.
If 4mm cable needed which faceplates have big enough terminals for 2 x 4mm T+E to be connected.
I havnt tried it but if others have recommendations I will give it a go in my workshop first.
Always wondered why no manufacturer ever came up with ring-specific RCBOs that have separate L1 L2 & N1 N2 connectors that continually monitor continuity in the ring and trip if continuity is lost on either conductor.
I'm sure if such a thing were invented it'd quickly become incorporated into future regs and they'd corner the market.
For one thing cost plus the extra terminals needed would be an issue with size. Also measuring continuity on an energised circuit while simultaneously feeding power to L1 and L2 is significantly non-trivial.
Same seems like it could be done using something like our CDs ( speech to text face slap RCD's) do. In the US were very accustomed to this concept of dule sized breakers since single slice is 120 and double is 240 until you get into the higher voltage phase panels...
I don't see why it couldn't be a double space special RCBO. Although you would run into a type tested issue as each manufacture would have to make one or test for compatibility. So no one single company unless they tested for compatibility on all brands hmm.
Seems like with a current sensor coil you would have hopefully somewhere approximately the same current draw on either leg. Or you could put a "filter" between the two legs and send a pulsed Digital signal on one and receive it on the other.
You'd need to transformer isolate your L1 and L2 feeds from the main incoming Live which at 32A is going to be a substantial transformer, then you'd need to superimpose a signal onto the mains to detect continuity so not really very practical.
@@mfx1 yes you need a 32 amp at least transformer to do it actively. I'm thinking possibly like how an RCD uses current sense coils just two of them one on each line?
Or since it digitally and then use an inductor to block the digital signal interfering with each side and past the breaker. Sort of how ethernet over power lines or those circuit tracer things work.
Do it passively, maybe I should just design this thing and patent it?
I don't even know why Im watching this but now I know. Thanks
Ok. That was great. What I don't see is what the advantage of running a radial is. If a broken ring can be repaired so easily then that to me is a big score for the ring final over the radial circuit. So again what are the pros for installing a radial?
Also rings safer because both legs have an earth if say in a radial of sockets and an earth gets cut the rest of the sockets won’t be earthed
There are no pros for a radial circuit, unless you count saving cable a pro
@@curtisj2165 radials don’t save on cable they use more
@@Josh-bs3ey care to explain how you came to the conclusion that radial circuits use more cable than ring circuits?
@@curtisj2165 um because u have to have more circuits and use a bigger size cable he literally said it in that video
Thanks for the explanation of why ring circuits got started. They were a new concept to me, being from the US. Very interesting!
Imo. It should be down to choice ( customers) choice ..I retire this year and for years I have done ring circuits , radials as well ..give the customers the choice , I Allways Have …
In a kitchen if your cooker, fridge and freezer are on separate circuits, but you could still have washing machine, dishwasher, dryer, air fryer, microwave, toaster and kettle all plugged in. You could easily have 3 of those things on at once totaling 30 amps.
I disagree, rings can be useful and if you are fitting radials on say a 5 bed house then the consumer unit would have more than 14 ways. At the end of the day it is down to cost and maybe Mr Nagy's customers have loads of money, but some customers do not and installing rings can be cost effective and keep the number of ways down.
If you can afford a 5 bed house, I assume you can afford to have it wired correctly
@@geoffball5803 Really? Tell that to someone buying a 5 bed terrace in Hartlepool for £65k, also that statement would make the alternative way incorrect which simply isn't the case.
Tom, you are the mutz nutz when it comes to lectures... Fab-ul-ous darling 😊
Nope. Rings have many advantages over radials - longer permitted circuit length in terms of voltage drop, more flexibility in installation reference methods, better diversity, smaller conductor size, less of the worlds resources wasted. The reasons you give for disliking them are: Some people don't know how to install them properly (that would only be a problem if it applies to you), and :You don't need them cos you're going to install a radial for every single kitchen or utility appliance (an absurd idea, one ring will do them all, bar the cooker).
And why do you think that a lower rated circuit is somehow safer?
Agree with most of this, but as for the last part - is it not safer to install the lowest rating protection you can for the demand, so in the event of overload conditions it trips quicker? E.g. a faulty 13A plug top oven, which failed to blow the plug top fuse would trip a 16a dedicated breaker quicker than a 32a.
That's a nice smiley face on the top right hand side of the board 🤣
Have you seen the cost of copper? Lighting rings next!
😅🤣😂
I have seen that before
The subscriber who suggested was definitely JW
nah, you just need .5mm2 for lights, they only need 10W each or so ;-)
Have you seen how much electricians charge lol. Cost lbs are passed onto client/customers
Over here in France we do 16amp radials for 8 sockets on 2.5mm. 20amp for heaters on 2.5mm (1 per 20amp). 10amp radials for lights on 1.5mm... 32amps are generaly only used for induction plates, ovens and pretty big AC units
I don't think you have thought this through the practicalities. (1) A ring main will give an element of convenience should any part of the ring be broken so that not all the system will go down. (2) A 2.5mm section is difficult enough to manipulate a connection in the various sockets. If you consider ever plugging in devices at the limit of the MCB (32a) then you would need to use a heavier cable for any spur that is not on a ring. Copper wire will not tolerate much bending whether single or multi strand and the risk of a breakage is much higher with thicker conductors. (3) Spurs can be added to a ring without losing end to end testing. for the whole ring. If you thing I am misguided pleas say.
The fact that a broken conductor in ring circuit would have no effect on its operation, is the one major flaw in the system. The ring circuit is able to operate safely on a circuit breaker that is rated higher than the current carrying capacity of the cable. This is because there are effectively two conductors sharing the current load back to the circuit breaker from any one point (ring). If the ring is broken, the conductor size is then effectively halved and becomes underrated for the circuit breaker and could lead to an overloading of the cable situation. This is why regular testing of ring final circuits is necessary. Despite this drawback, the long historical use of the ring circuit has shown that it’s flexibility outweighs the relatively small and manageable safety risk.
@@demonkey123 I totally agree and I thought I got that clear. I assumed that if there was a break on a ring circuit either half would be ok to carry a 2.5 mm wire 32 amp load on a 230v and I am aware there is a limit to the length of a typical ring of 2.5mm wire for that very reason - please do correct me if I'm wrong.
@@Cruner62 In optimal conditions (RM-C) the maximum current carrying capacity of a 2.5mm2 conductor is 27A rendering it underrated for 32A protection. A spur wired from a ring (intact ring) in 2.5 is deemed acceptable as the maximum number of accessories is one, limiting it to 13A in the case of a singe socket or 20A in the case of an un-switched spur or 26A in the case of a double socket. In the 3rd case, care should be taken to observe the current limiting factors of the cable installation method i.e. 2.5mm cables installed in a steel conduit would be reduced to a maximum current carrying capacity of 20A. This would prohibit the installation of a double socket on a single spur.
Totally agree Tom, the only issue I find with installing radials is that the terminals on many wiring accessories struggle to take 2 x 4mm conductors, let alone a third if you want to add a spur.
You'd only need 4mm for a 32A radial - 2.5 is the other "standard" arrangement for a 20A radial.
And like Tom said, if you really did need 32A capacity, probably best split some load off on another circuit.
@@simonparkinson1053 Good point well made. The fact that I just automatically assumed a sockets circuit would have 32A capacity just proves the point that this is an ingrained habit with many UK sparks.
Poor workmamship or lack of knowledge by someone unqualified isn't enough of an argument to support you hate of them
Exactly what I was thinking. The problem is not the ring circuit, its the lazy and/or unqualified tossers that mess them up!
My thoughts exactly, most of the negativity is around what might happen and very little about the technical side of things.
7:30 old rings - 5A up lighting, 5A down lighting, 30A up sockets ring 30A down sockets ring and 30A cooker feed - likely with a a socket fitted to the cooker switch.
15A immersion heater, 15A bathroom wall radiant heater. 15A spare.
Ooo that warm n fuzzy rewire-able Wylex feeling 😍
@@demonkey123 Sounds like you recognise that 'finger-print' ;)
We (the fusebox and I) laugh at people with MCBs, RCDs, RCBOs etc. etc. My 5A fuses are strong enough to blow holes in lightbulb caps without flinching.
Although, I ought to admit, I've not examined the fuses for genuineness but those I've seen have been correct...
However, we have a 20A GEC switch feeding outbuildings - never been in that box but recently felt the mech was due lubrication - so examined the copper wire where the fuse should be. Switch states 20A and as I recently found some 10A fusewire in the garden (yes, some prefer growing weed), it now has 2 pieces of that in it.
Honestly it depends on the use case scenario and cost. 2x RCBO's + 2 radials may end up more expensive than one 32 amp ring, also if you've go multiple daughters if you only have a 20 amp radial and they happen to both be getting ready at the same time I have been called out to radials tripping out due to overload. In the end it comes down to the practicality of installation and although I would love to just fit radials expense is a thing and so many customers don't want a separate circuit for dish washer and white goods they just want a 32 amp kitchen ring because it's all in the same place. Regardless of advice or trying to explain, there is also the grief these days of trying to run a 32 amp kitchen radial with USB sockets and box depths required for 4mm cable.
Yep, this is my thinking. 4mm radials would be ideal but it’s a pain in the arse to work with, especially when you have to get a spur in as well.
Never use 25mm boxes for sockets
I wanted separate circuits for kitchen appliances but advised against. Do have separate circuits for boiler, hob, two ovens. Wanted them for fridge, freezer, washing machine, tumbler dryer. I put in the back boxes and have conduit everywhere so could change and simple thread cable through to where needed
what kind of heavy machinery are those daughters using for 'getting ready' that trips the breaker ? 😨
Yep - Exeter here (well, Newton Abbot, but I work in Exeter). The same is true all around Southernhay - you can see the remains of the old railings in the granite kerb stones where they cut them off.
My grandfather taught me about rings when I started my apprenticeship. He started his career in the UK then moved to Aus in his 20s.
Seemed pretty redundant in modern times, we've never had em here in Australia.
That’s cos it’s hot in Australia and you don’t use 3kw electric fires in the winter!
Good video love the graffiti in the top right hand side of the white board 😂😂
I think it's good that on a ring you can spur a socket off once for every socket that is on the ring. Not sure if you can do that with radials, never done it.
There's a housing development around my way that was built in the 70s, concrete floors. One ring final in each house, running upstairs and all downstairs sockets were spurs off from it!
Radials you can in effect have a "tree" circuit, but then that is extra work when it comes to testing as you will have to test multiple "ends". Though with socket outlets you'd be testing all points anyway.
I don't know what the regs say, but safety-wise there's no reason you can't run unlimited spurs off a radial as everything is protected by a suitable breaker. The problem with spurs off a ring is a 32A breaker exceeds the rating of a single run of 2.5mm cable.
@@mikeselectricstuff Thing is 2.5mm T&E isn't rated at 32amp for a ring anyway I think it's rated at 26amp. The theory is the load is halfed from each leg. Dodgey area is rings lol
We originally had a ring, but forced into having a two radials due to a damaged cable. We didn't upgrade the cable, left the existing one from the ring circuit.
We don't have a shortage in supply, famous last words.
That one comment will send every sparky into panic and by next Tuesday there will be a national shortage of cable.
Educational Friday vids at a touch dull fella 🤣
Rings are great for home owners. Can plug in lots of heaters if your boiler fails. However electricians have to test them it takes lots of time, hurts their head, and if it fails they get really grumpy having to fault find.
I love your 'Betty Crocker' and 'Schlepp & Kovak' references Tom 😊
Not really convinced that 20A radial is enough for kitchen sockets - I frequently have dishwasher and washing machine on together, I know they are not heating the water all the time but at the start of the cycle they will be, so we're at at least 20A already - before I've made my toast or boiled the kettle :-)
Most kitchens here in the us we would have 2-3 radials. And washing machine, dryer and dishwasher, oven, fridge freezers would be on their own dedicated circuits. Of course kitchens here are larger but usually they are 20amp radials.
Rings are rearly used over here in Ireland. We've never had an issues with radical circuits in our kitchen.
I still can't get over how British homes have their clothes washers in the kitchen. I know, it made sense back when houses were smaller.
@@tncorgi92 Yes it isn't great - larger homes here quite often have a utility room for that sort of thing, but for many houses and flats the kitchen is the typical location - as it has the plumbing and drainage.
@@tncorgi92 I can't get over how many Australian flats have washers in bathrooms!
A lot of the properties I work in on our council contract have 20A rcbo's protecting the rings in 2.5, and 32A wired in 4mm (also rings). That's what they spec
Rings are without a doubt the most backwards, UK specific thing I've ever seen. And I am constantly surprised that people still insist on installing them new and maintaining them.
In Australia we have the same operating voltage and frequency. With similar maximum current demands in areas like kitchens and laundries. But ring circuits aren't even a consideration. In fact your average domestic sparky wouldn't even know what the fuck it is.
The generally accepted approach is to have the laundry and kitchen on different, radial socket outlet circuits and that's it.
Blows my mind that people cant evolve to improved circuit arrangements.
-No fuse spurs
-No maintaining a ring to add 1 socket. infact if you find a power circuit cable in the roof you can just Jbox and branch off for a new socket
-fewer possible faults
Shits wild
You don't have to maintain the ring to add a socket, you are allowed to branch off
@@curtisj2165 Dont you also have to add a fuse at the branching location though?
@@trmindustries.2549 no you don't, as strange as it sounds
@@curtisj2165 That means that the cable between the branch point and the socket would be underprotected by the circuit protection. How backwards.
Imagine a damaged appliance or a partial A-N fault. The cable would fucken cook.
@@trmindustries.2549 not necessarily, 2.5mm cable is rated at 26 amps and the circuit is protected by a 32 amp circuit breaker. As Thomas said you could downgrade to a 16 or 20 amp breaker, and life would be all good
You say "the reason we used rings was they use less copper". That seems like a it's still a very valid reason to use them today. Second reason to use rings, the voltage drop at the furthest socket from the CU is halved compared to a radial.
Two lightning circuits and three socket? More like one of each back in the day.
I wasn't convinced by the argument that the service cutout might be only 40A I can't say I've seen one that small and it would only apply to a miniscule number of properties.
Radials over rings? Well rings have served us well for 70 years of they're not idiot proof but what is?
Yes indeed, many UK houses up until the late 70s with only one ring. Definitely the case in my childhood home - two 5A lighting circuits, one 30A ring and a 30A cooker radial. That house had no central heating so the ring was supplying free standing electric heaters and also an immersion heater for hot water. It worked, the fuse never failed but then again a 30A rewireable fuse can run well over 30A for hours before it melts.
@@rossthompson1635 You are making the case for doing away with rings! The fuse just will not blow even if the cable is overloaded, house will burn down. It could run an electric shower and not blow on 32a. Absolute gift to cowboys and DIY, it dosnt blow, works fine job done. They are not safe.
@@jondonnelly3 Well yes, certainly true with old rewireable fuses. I'm a bit happier with a ring on a 32A breaker, but yes - if the ring continuity is poor then a section could easily be overloaded.
The last ring I fitted was in 1992 - all radials since then. Nice to see that you are catching on.
What circuits do you install, the appropriate circuits, . Until you been in a building and spoke to the client and you know what needs to be installed then you select the appropriate circuits. These things are never cut and dry. This is the same argument people have with lightning , 2 plate or 3 plate , if I'm installing down lighters then it's 2 plate , if it's pendants then it's 3 plate . everything has its pros and cons.
I always look at installations from a future maintenance point of view which is why in domestic rewires the upstairs and downstairs sockets we do are rings on 16A/20A. Boiler dedicated 10A radial. Kitchen appliances 20A ring and kitchen sockets 20A ring. The circuit has the correct ocpd from design stage taking into account Shlep & Co's future incompetence which provides a safer installation. Unless of course Betty Crocker croaks it because of shoddy Shleps modifications it in which case it's end of the road for Shlep....
20A rings, whats the point?
Who did the drawing in the top right.. 👀
emmmmm........
I thought that was a self portrait... 😉
House built 1949. Wylex 4 way. 1 lights, 1 sockets (ring), 1 boiler, 1 cooker. That's it. I upgraded/dragged the system up 3 years ago. Did a quick 'tickle' test @250 and it said, and? Well impressed for integrity of old cables (still sent them off to retire though)
If the electricity is already flowing around a ring, appliances will turn on quicker then having to wait for the electricity to flow all the way from the consumer unit. 😜
Electricity travels at the speed of light
Electricity travels very slowly, if you imagine a tube full of marbles if pushed from one end the marble at the other end pops out, can push marble in slowly and pops out almost instantly
Electron flow from one atom of copper to the next travels at or near to the spead of light which is 186282.3959 miles per second. That is quite fast. Any effect on a ring final circuit would be, well, not much!
Sounds like a plumber..🤷🏻♂️
@@johndavies4919
Actually electrons are massive particles so obviously they cannot travel the same speed as massless photons.
They travel about 90% the speed of light with 220,000 electron-volts, to get an electron traveling 99.9% the speed of light you need ridiculous amounts of energy (11,000,000eV)
This is one of the reasons why fibreoptic internet is faster than electrons & copper!
I support 4mm radials, 32A rcbo. Sockets I find do not have large enough terminals to spur off, once you have a feed in and feed to next socket. No room for a branch if needed.
I love the "Betty Crocker" references because now when I'm in the grocery store going down the baking aisle I just laugh. No one else knows why of course.
The vision of her falling down the stairs, scalding herself with her brew and snapping her neck because someone installed a split load board?
Good video Tom, very well explained.
Currently I'm a 2.5 Radials 25amp rcbo socket circuit installer ( Hagar) 😄
The one benefit of ring circuits is that you can eliminate a compromised leg and get a circuit working without causing any damage, something I do quite a lot. No ones ever been able to explain to me why a ring uses less copper (in a normal domestic situation). The equivalent 2 radials instead of a ring will use one less leg of cable than a ring. I know you can get bigger circuits with a ring but is it really a problem in a normal house? Radials take up more circuit breakers but I agree its a better payoff as you get better separation. A radial to every room should be the norm like it is in most countries.
One ring for the whole house and a standard plug and socket for everything was a big saving in materials compared to wiring from the 1930s and earlier.
1930s = many different incompatible plugs and sockets, multiple circuits with multiple fuses
1947 onwards = one ring circuit for the whole house, one fuse, one design of standard plug and socket for everything.
@@jwflame Is it that of a saving compared to 2 radials?
1 radial upstairs and 1 radial downstairs would use less cable? Assuming a separate circuit for cooking equipment
@@londontrada No. 1930s wiring was 1 circuit per socket in most cases. 6 sockets = 6 individual fuses for 6 individual circuits, and those sockets could be 2 amp, 5 amp, 15 amp and either 2 or 3 pin, all of which were totally incompatible. Some may have had 2 or 3 sockets per circuit for the lower ratings, but the whole concept of a radial with a large number of identical sockets didn't exist when rings were designed in the 1940s.
2x 20A radials will use less cable than a 32A ring, but that comparison wasn't valid at the time.
@@jwflame OK, I wasn't aware of any of that I'm just comparing the two today
Some great points and in agreement but was surprised ‘load balancing’ wasn’t one of the key points. I’m not familiar with kitchens with dedicated circuits for fridge, freezer, washer or tumble dryer but for the many many ring circuits out there, several high current appliances have potential to be placed anywhere in the kitchen and potentially exceed the maximum current carrying capacity by simply following the path of least resistance. So I think the idea of a couple dedicated appliance radials is decent, but a 4mm ring would be safer in modern bigger kitchens.
Wait till AFDD's are mandated in Amendment 2. At £120 a breaker you will have no chance in winning any work if your having to put more circuits. Rings are very useful for kitchen unless you have a separate utility area for washer/dryer, the most dangerous thing about a ring circuit is the fact that you can have a cable break that can turn it into a radial and you wont necessarily have a clue, the other problems around DIY and non competent people working on electrics doing silly things I dont think you can regulate for idiots that should not be touching electrics unless you want to go down the route of only electricians can touch electrics, but too many people have a go hero's, only the other day found a cable where some plonker had used the CPC as a permanent live on a switch cable so had neutral as neutral, line and switched line and cpc as permanent live. Nothing wrong with a ring as long as idiots don't mess with it but as the example above shows, even going to radial does not solve any issues.
AFDD's dont work with a ring circuit. Electricity follows the path of least resistance, its not going to arc across the fault, its going round the other leg instead
@@MrJTJINX There are different types of arc's Serial and parrallel.. The AFDD's are designed to allow or things like light switches, they dont trip on a one off arc, they are looking for a continuous arc.. Don't get me wrong it seems mad to fit them at the source of the circuit so it trips the entire circuit, surely it would be better to have them in every appliance as I agree thats where the issues are more prevalent... But there are too make of the big players that would lobby against it...
It seems to me that while radials certainly have some benefits 16 amps is not enough current in many situations. You mentioned a separate circuit for the sockets in a kitchen but a kettle alone would be maybe 10A so a toaster and microwave couldn't be used at the same time. A couple of hair dyers on at the same time could trip a bedrooms circuit too.
I think to make it work you would need more circuits than you suggest, possibly one per bedroom and quite a few for a kitchen, while that may sound excessive it would only mean a larger consumer unit and a bit of extra cable and would also make fault finding easier.
Anyway it's an interesting discussion.
What ever the next topic is, I am looking forward to the evolution of the "face" drawing.
Ah yes the "face" drawing! ;-)
Looks like the guy from fartisan electric
It has a strange stare!
Love the explanation Tom! Great to see the different methods used in the UK vs. here in Europe
My kitchen layout means I could easily have these on at the same time
Kettle 3000W/13A - Toaster 1500W/6.5A - Microwave 1200W/5A = 25A
Will you have then on at the same time? Beans on Toast and a cup of tea?
I'm with you on that, although it is possible to install 32A radials using 4mm^2 cable. It can be a bit awkward as many power sockets only have terminals which can take 2 x 4mm cables, so it can be a bit awkward to run 3 cables into one.
nb. I can add a 2 kW electric fryer to the list, and my microwave draws about 1.5 kW, and it can act as a 3 kW convection oven.
Great video, make so much sense. So much safer than a ring, where a single damaged cable may go unnoticed.
Not true, a damaged cable can go unnoticed in a radial and be arguably more dangerous.
You make lots of assumptions re what items are on separate circuits, Most of mine are on the power ring including the lower sockets of the house and only the cooker is on its own radial. Yet a lot depends upon the appliances used,the kitchen is one place where power-hungry machines might threaten an overload.
Betty came back to defrosted Fortnum and Mason food, because some idiot had put the ring circuit on a 16A breaker.
The requirements for Surge Protection. I think put them in, a lot of people don't. Thats a Friday video right there 👍🏻
To add another point to your last point, damaged cable between two sockets, circuit gets re energised and all sockets work again, but are then sat on a 32a mcb / rcbo, overloading the now two radials may not trip the mcb, cable melts as ccc less than 32a 😫
Hi Tom , good video,,
Another Topic : schneider light switches with loop for neutrals / cpc , haven’t seen any other brand doing it,
Therefore i only install schneider
Topic 2 : should be all bring neutrals to switches? I think that makes more sense
Hager sollysta also do looped in neutrals. Bringing neutrals to switch terminals future proofs the installation for smart accessories. More and more customers want smart control of their appliances and lighting.
@@rayc1503 fair enough with hager, however in my point of view, hager is overpriced for no reason
Totally agree with you with neutrals in switches
Great educational & common sense video and especially was waiting for outtakes, excellent!
Suggestion: Maybe as next topic could you why & explain and pro & con of single vs three phases in a house would or wouldn’t benefit from past, present and future if any.
Toms solution. Remove 3 rings and fit 10 radials.
Begins to make sense with the price of the FuseBox RCBOs. At a fraction over £10 each, you can easily sell the benefit, whereas at £30 each you'd struggle.
I did a job a couple of years ago where the client wanted a separate radial for every downstairs room. No problem selling that job!
18 way Hager board with rcbos, not cheap but safety first...
in my country we dont use rings, but for example when doing outdoor lighting, we might bury the cable as a ring but only connect one end of it, leaving us a second chance in case of cable fault in the future, getting the reliability of being able to split a ring on a radial
4mm 32a radials rarely work in domestic installations due to derating factors
Great point tom especially with all the insulation in timber frame . We fit 2.5 rings on 25amp breakers .
That's better than fitting a 2.5mm 20amp radial circuit which isnt clipped direct though
@@Rich10000 ref method 100 & 102 can still be used in the configuration you have mentioned.
Ring circuits are still totally fit for purpose in my opinion. 4mm 32a radials are only good for about 30m in length until you run the risk of exceeded max ZS values.
@@tomorichard I agree. Max surface area normally for rings is 100m^2 and for radials is 75m^2 so rings can cover more area. I think it can change a tad under conductor csa or if its lighting or power cant remember
100% agree. Stop fitting rings.
The copper saving in new installs was real; but by the time we were building new to the hew standards the war was over. Just as significant was re-wiring existing property. Typically pre-war each room would have 1 × 15A outlet. One radial for each, sometimes one for each floor floor. Re-using those and adding just a little new cable you could turn them into a 30A ring without having to tear everything up.
Can't wait to see Tom terminate 2 6mm into a 32A radial for the kitchen Appliances 😂
4mm for a 32 amp radial in most cases
Topic idea.
Running power from house to shed/workshop/summerhouse in the garden.