Discuss Commercial premesis, computers, RCD or not to RCD? in the UK Electrical Forum area at ElectriciansForums.net

However, you really should have a "utility" socket or two in the server room for any cleaners use, test equipment, etc, so no one plugs in a faulty device and either shock themselves or trip the supply to all of the racks, etc. That should be RCD protected, of course.

General office outlets are more of a problem in that you can't be so sure of the usage. Some companies have a strict no-PAT/no-usage policy on anything brought it, others not. For desk sockets for office PCs in that case the risk is very low. But often offices will have sink/kettle/etc around so at the very least that sort of outlet should be RCD protected.
Non -Standard MK sockets would sort that bit but would still have no RCD protection for buried cables less than 50mm
 
Non standard sockets would also require additional protection their configuration is not relevant. The risk assessment to omit additional rcd protection should be carried out by the client.
 
Non -Standard MK sockets would sort that bit but would still have no RCD protection for buried cables less than 50mm
If the cables are < 50mm from walls then you do have that issue. If it is being rewired then that could be changed, either trunking or using Flexishield.

Non-standard sockets are an absolute pain as you can't use the supplied leads that come with kit, not can you take a chunk of stuff elsewhere to test it!
 
The server room is fairly easy in the sense that it is normally controlled access and rack-mounted equipment can have supplementary bonding to the racks so you have very reliable ADS by that means. So it is easy to justify no RCD protection for them.

However, you really should have a "utility" socket or two in the server room for any cleaners use, test equipment, etc, so no one plugs in a faulty device and either shock themselves or trip the supply to all of the racks, etc. That should be RCD protected, of course.

General office outlets are more of a problem in that you can't be so sure of the usage. Some companies have a strict no-PAT/no-usage policy on anything brought it, others not. For desk sockets for office PCs in that case the risk is very low. But often offices will have sink/kettle/etc around so at the very least that sort of outlet should be RCD protected.
Could find non standard T sockets (landlord sockets I think they often get called) for either Thier kit or tht cleaner, whichever is more likely to plug in non approved kit
 
Could find non standard T sockets (landlord sockets I think they often get called) for either Thier kit or tht cleaner, whichever is more likely to plug in non approved kit
What difference will using a non standard socket make the Regulations do not make allowances for this, it is a socket outlet.
 
If its a genuine server room you might find that there are racks and each rack has two power distribution units, fed from two different circuits connected via commando sockets (so your not talking normal sockets) , as an ex IT engineer if you want redundancy then all but the really low end servers have the option for two or more PSU's, some of the blade systems we used a lot had 6 power supplies and you could lose upto 4 of them depending on the number of servers...

Power supplies in servers because of the heat etc commonly caused tripping, just ask a big bank when I started as an IT engineer, there was a faulty PSU, to test the psu was faulty not the cable or PDU etc I connected a spare power cable from the other PDU and plugged it into the faulty PSU to confirm that the PSU was actually bad before ordering a new one.... Well you see what I had not seen was that the faulty PSU had shorted taking out the circuit breaker rendering one of the two PDU's with no power, not a problem the servers carried on with the other PDU, that was until I connected that to the bad PSU, a big flash and bang later I tripped the other circuit breaker to the other PDU and took down all the servers in the rack, they controlled hundreds of ATM machines which all temporarily went down... I learnt a lesson that day that I never forgot and thankfully after a quick reset of the breaker everything came back up..

Anyway my point is until you get there you wont know what you are dealing with..
 

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