"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message
...
In article
,
nome writes:
hello
our old cooker has packed up and were looking to replace with like for
like, A single electric fan oven that slides into a unit. The old
cooker was just plugged into a socket and looking around most products
seem to be hardwired in and require an electrician. Confusingly I
can't find anything that explains why some are socket based and most
are hardwired.

IME, most ovens run from sockets with a max load of about 2.5kW.
You need to go to really big ones before they have to be hardwired.

So we got an electrician in that quoted for, a hardwired oven, a wire
running back to our board. Then looking at our board he said it did
not meet current regs and recommended, if we want, a newer board
either with a RCD on the main switch or RCDs on 2 separate sections.
This work also required testing all our electrics. The total cost is a
lot more than buying another socketed oven!

Your installation does not need to be brought up to current regs,
providing it still conforms to the regs in place at the time it
was last installed/modified, and isn't unsafe.
Lots of electricians try this one on.

I often get around this by installing a new CU next to the existing one if
the existing one is not suitable.

A small inexpensive 2 way RCD main switch CU unit can save a customer quite
a bit of money.

Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

Adam