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Hey my old man was a 'glass maintenance technician'.
in my younger days, I used to maintain glasses, plates and cutlery in our local pub.
i don't recall many of my colleagues referring to me as an engineer or technician!!!!
 
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in my younger days, I used to maintain glasses, plates and cutlery in our local pub.
i don't recall many of my colleagues referring to me as an engineer or technician!!!!

If I listed them, most of the would look like this f*ing **
My old man had to buy hundreds of pennies worth of equipment too. He only needed 3 tools though. One was a large volume moisture retaining vessel, one was the rubber-tipped water vapour scraper and the most important tool was the multicellular water dispensing unit which could be used to effectively maintain the glass. Technical stuff.
 
The regs are more general, it is really a reference to any assembly of electrical parts. In the domestic world that really comes down to the CU, but beyond that it really applies to anything to put together to do a job in an installation.

Some aspects of the standards cited are only applicable to big systems (forget the details but over 100A at least) where it covers aspects like would busbars bend under huge fault currents, etc, etc. But generally the way it is interpreted is as @timhoward say - stick to a supplier's pre-assembled CU or at least the list of parts they declare as compatible.

While I am normally happy with sane and reasoned attempts to replace difficult parts instead of ripping the whole lot out, when presented with something like that I would agree with @westward10 and feel very uneasy at re-using something obviously bodged and of unknown provenance. Especailly as the cost of fixing it properly would be dominated by the skilled time, not by the likes of a budget Fusebox (or similar) CU where it is known to be as specified..
I didn't take any of this into account. An important lesson for me going forward so thanks guys for explaining it.
 
My old man had to buy hundreds of pennies worth of equipment too. He only needed 3 tools though. One was a large volume moisture retaining vessel, one was the rubber-tipped water vapour scraper and the most important tool was the multicellular water dispensing unit which could be used to effectively maintain the glass. Technical stuff.
 
I didn't take any of this into account. An important lesson for me going forward so thanks guys for explaining it.
No worries.

Though looking at that example it is not the 'modified CU' aspect that bothers me most, it is the obvious lack of knowledge/care in installing it that rings alarm bells. There are a lot of circuits coming off what looks like 4mm T&E and even without totalling up loads, etc, you start to wonder "was this actually designed at all?" from the point of view of total load and any requirements for selectivity so faults have a reasonable chance of being isolated to the circuit responsible.

So it is more than changing the CU, it is looking at the whole installation and trying to figure out what is needed and how best to do it for the client.
 
The issues for me looking at that board

Supply to the board doesn't look adequate

No isolation on the board

Non standard method of wrong the breakers, dunno what the rules are on that
They may be identical top and bottom and work both ways but when i switch off an mcb I expect the top to be dead here

Probably more issues
 
My old man had to buy hundreds of pennies worth of equipment too. He only needed 3 tools though. One was a large volume moisture retaining vessel, one was the rubber-tipped water vapour scraper and the most important tool was the multicellular water dispensing unit which could be used to effectively maintain the glass.
No aerial access equipment ?
Would you dare to use patten parts on your car instead of the OM products?
I frequently do - but it does depend on what it is. Safety critical stuff is normally "known decent makes", so (e.g.) Ferodo is OK for brake pads, but I'd think twice about ACME ?
 
I frequently do - but it does depend on what it is. Safety critical stuff is normally "known decent makes", so (e.g.) Ferodo is OK for brake pads, but I'd think twice about ACME ?
But neither of those are factory original products from the car manufacturer, probably would be Ferodo in a different colour together with the original car makers mark up that is.
 
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That was the point - the question was "would you use pattern parts ?", as in use parts not coming from the car manufacturer. As we (probably) all know, a huge proportion of any car is bought in parts - and buying the OEM part without the car manufacturer mark up is usually a huge saving. And then there are other manufacturers who might not be the OEM, but are of the same standard.

And then, there are others where ... you have to be a bit more cautious, hence the ACME reference ? In the Land Rover fraternity, there is a parts supplier who supply many parts for older vehicles, but have a bit of a reputation for ... "variable quality". It's tricky with them since some of the parts they sell are actually OEM parts.

Back to electrical ...
Talking about the issue of only using an approved assembly (ref a few posts above). What if a CU came with some fixing screws and the MIs said it could only be fixed in place using the supplied fixings. Would that mean that you'd have to scrap it and go buy another one if you dropped one of the screws and couldn't find it ? Or would you simply substitute an equivalent against the wording of the MIs ? And what if the fixings provided just weren't suitable ?
I know this is taking things a bit far, but if you think about it, the screws used to fix the thing (assuming suitable) will have as much effect on performance of individual breakers and the whole assembly as a correctly sized piece of copper cable (e.g. RCD-neutral bar link).
 
Would you dare to use patten parts on your car instead of the OM products?
In another parallel life, I 'do' BMW cars. 90% of the new spare parts I fit are not from BMW, but a large proportion of them are still OEM. It's not unusual to find a part (especially those containing blocks of rubber) has burr marks, where the BMW roundel logo has been ground off.
 

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