Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In article ,
"ARW" writes:
Brian Gaff wrote:
Was it a mission Impossible special I wonder? Fuseboxes to not
catch fire unless something very bad has been going on...


Like a loose neutral on the ring circuit.

That's what the article on fires in plastic consumer units identified
as the main cause - bad neutral connections, although sometimes in the
pre-assembed parts of the CU.

Was it a Wylex like the one in their picture of a burning CU (which
looked to me like a Wylex)?

The one from here?

http://www.esc.org.uk/fileadmin/user...5-Locked_2.pdf

Thats a Wylex (or a rebaged Wylex). Dunno what it was that had caught fire.

Well it was a metal clad CU that I replaced but it was the plastic mountings
on the neutral bar that caught fire. I did take some photos with my phone
but I have no USB lead for! I'll see if I can get them downloaded later.

Had it been a plastic CU then it would have been much worse. All the cables
entered the CU from above and they entered the house at joist height where
someone had removed a brick and filled the gap up around the cables with
scunched up newspaper. I left the owner to fill up both inner and outer
cavity holes with fire rated expanding foam.

There was surprisingly very little cable damage but I put this down to the
fact that they were lucky and quick to notice the fire. One thing I did
notice was that it looked like one of the neutral cables had snapped at the
bus bar. That makes me think that it is possible that the neutral supply was
actually a radial.

However there was a lot of soot inside the CU and things were difficult to
see and I was not there to do a full diagnosis of the cause of the fire. The
cooker neutral was also very loose but that only supplied the spark for the
gas hob and oven. Several other terminal were also loose including a couple
of lives but not on the ring or cooker circuits.

--
Adam