Lieutenant Scott wrote:

On Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:00:43 -0000, Tim Watts
wrote:

Lieutenant Scott wrote:


I suspect it's a properly soldered joint.

And at this point, adding a fuse would not be a problem.

Buried under the road? I suspect not.

but it is.

Pavement in the case I saw.

yes, I've seen them there, but we have no pavement on our side of the
road.
the cable is simply under the carriageway.

A fuse could be place there.


Joints used to be ferruled and soldered. These days they are more often
crimped, I believe.

Fuses exist in "link boxes" which are in the road, accessible with a
visible lid (obviously) and more often occur when a feed splits off to
service a side road, but not always (could be a solid joint, or you could
have a link box somewhere along a straight section of road). The fuses
which are fitted in 3's (3 phases) vary from typically 300A to 500A.

Having a visible box marked "SEEBOARD" or some such is no guarantee of
presence of fuses - it could also be a fuse box fitted with solid links
(copper bars) if the engineers decided a fuse at that position was not
actually useful, or wanted the option to fuse later.

So is it just a matter of they found it cheaper to fit 500A cable to each
house than to fit 100A cable and a fusebox? I would have thought thicker
cable up everyone's driveway was very expensive.

No - they fit a 100A cable (or less) up everyone's driveway. That is jointed
in a resin (or older "compound") filled joint box to the cable, which may be
larger that 500A (remember, this is a network cabling system and may
(usually is) fed from at least both ends of the road).

This is why, if you put a spade through the cable under your drive that
feeds your house, you'll get a not inconsiderable bang.

And require the purcahse of a new spade.


And trousers....

--
Tim Watts