On 27/12/2011 14:53, 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.

They will probably use the 100A cable and the 500A fuse. The fuse would
not be intended to protect the cable from overload anyway, only faults.

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.

As a minimum ;-)


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/