In article , Arny Krueger
writes
It doesn't belong in a closet for a rented room!
Sure doesn't, but remember much of the UK housing stock is old and
predates electricity. My house still has the lead pipes embedded in the
walls which were used to feed gas lighting, and much of the old lead-
sheathed power cables (copper cores wrapped in waxed paper then sheated
in a lead outer). No longer in use, thankfully.
We did not have the "cleansing" effects of a world war fought in our
country to push us along.
On the contrary, the cost of the war meant that little money was
available to improve the existing housing stock and little new was
built. What was built were cheap prefab houses intended to be
temporary. Indeed, some of those survive and are now "listed", which
means they are protected from inappropriate modification and/or
demolition.
It's not binding on the rest of the world but the town I lived in in Germany
looked like it had been reworked from top to bottom *after* WW2. We had
416 3 phase in our apartment for heating water.
Germany has done very well since the war - a lot of money was ploughed
into the country to rebuild. Some would say too much. American and
European money.
Yes, the salutary effects of higher voltages on conductor size are very
apparent. U.S. standards for wiring are getting to be excessively expensive
to implement.
the rocketing price of copper certainly doesn't help.
Aluminum was tried and rejected for general house wiring
no wonder when you see photos like these:
http://inspectapedia.com/aluminum/wirefire.htm
I think, but am not sure, that it was briefly tried in the UK but not
many installations were carried out before it was withdrawn.
Some older phone infrastructural wiring in aluminium is still in use
(mainly in trunk cables) and those are known to severely degrade ADSL
sync speeds.
You have to remember that when most of our standards were developed and
widely implemented, copper was a cheap byproduct of mining silver. ;-)
Boy, have tomes changed ;-)
--
(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")