Who's rewired their house for this hobby?

[Brent Hilpert]

On 2014-Nov-24, at 5:39 AM, Peter Corlett wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 02:12:15PM -0800, Brent Hilpert wrote:
> [...]
>> The ring system in Britain with fuses in the plugs provides a safety factor
>> of appropriately limited current at the wall.  On the other hand, in NA the
>> vast majority of in-wall house wiring is done with #14 wire(15A circuits),
>> which is a lot easier to work than whichever gauge Britain uses for 25A or
>> 32A circuits.
> 
> Actually, we use the same gauge, except it's in metric :) Or to give actual
> figures, 32A ring circuits typically use 2.5mm^2 cable, whereas #14 is
> approximately 2.1mm^2.  It's stiffer than 13A mains flex, but easy enough to
> work with.
> 
> The ring circuit provides two paths back to the fuse box, so the whole circuit
> can in theory carry twice the current.  In practice, of course, the paths don't
> have equal resistance so the current will not be shared equally.  This
> especially applies when one path has infinite resistance due to some muppet
> cocking up the installation, as a quick continuity test won't detect it.

Right, I was forgetting about the ring part and just looking at the current part (a 32A circuit in NA would require at least #10 wire (5.26 mm^2)), although it's interesting that size gauge is allowed even in light of the ring.
But then you have to form the ring which is it's own expense, so in terms of my original point of varying tradeoffs it's just a different tradeoff.)


>> The benefit of the North American split-phase system vs EU/Britain
> 
> Point of order: The UK is part of the EU;

Yes, tepidly it sometimes seems from watching from a distance, (and except for the Euro).
They were just getting discussed with some distinctions in the course of the thread.