On Monday, 22 June 2015 04:51:01 UTC+1, John Rumm wrote:
On 21/06/2015 23:20, Jim x321x wrote:

My house was built and wired in the 1980s and has an old-style fuse box.
The old fuses have all been repeplaced with cirquit-breakers plugged into
the fuse sockets. A couple of people, such as estate agents and
electricians have raised eyebrows on seeing the box, telling me it should
be changed for a modern RCD unit. Is this true? I've never had any problems

There is no legal requirement to change it.

with the existing setup, and I rarely get any inexplicable tripping of the
circuit breakers. As far as I am aware, the old fuse boxes (even when fuses
contained fuse wire) did what they were designed to do, with no problems.

They did what they were supposed to - and will still do so. The main
thing your current setup lacks is RCD protection.

My fuse box has circuit-breakers for:
Upstairs ring main
Downstairs ring main
Upstairs light circuit
Downstairs lighting circuit
Electric shower circuit
External security lights circuit

Obviously, I'd like to avoid the expense of updating it if I'm not under
any legal obligation to change anything. Is there really a significant
increase in electrical safety with the modern RCD units?

RCDs represent a significant improvement in safety. Especially if you
ever use electrical tools / appliances outside. The lack of RCD
protection would also make adding or extending your existing
installation in a compliant way more difficult, should you need to do so.

(some will argue that the chances of being killed by an electric shock
in the home in the UK is vanishingly small, and indeed they are correct.
However that misses the significant number of non fatal injuries per
year (200K hospital admissions), the vast majority of which would have
been prevented by a working RCD).

RCDs greatly shorten shock duration of L-E shocks. They don't act on L-N shocks.
Someone going to hospital because they got scared doesn't mean they're injured.


NT