On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 19:41:50 +0100, harry wrote:

On Saturday, 29 August 2015 14:19:08 UTC+1, Tough Guy no. 1265 wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 10:06:26 +0100, newshound wrote:

On 29/08/2015 01:17, wrote:
On Saturday, 29 August 2015 00:13:19 UTC+1, Tough Guy no. 1265 wrote:
My father has said he has a 415V sticker on the feed into his meter box. From what he's told me there is the normal arrangement of master fuse, meter, then into the house to the consumer unit. The house was built in 1985ish and is detached. I've never seen inside the meterbox myself, only the consumer unit, which looked like a normal run of the mill row of circuit breakers with one master at the end, 100A. If there were three phases in the meterbox I'd expect his description to include a lot more. Now the previous owner did have an ironwork hobby with "high powered equipment", but he was a very frugal sort and I doubt he would have got three phases installed if he didn't absolutely have to - mind you I believe he was the first owner of the house and designed it himself, so maybe it's just as cheap to get three phases when building the property? The reason this has come up is they've just had a 10kW electric shower fitted (used to run from the hot water tank, but that
one
wa
s
old and leaky) and are considering replacing their ageing oil boiler with an electric one, which the electrician fitting the shower warned would require a relay to switch off the boiler so it didn't run at the same time as the shower as he'd run out of juice. When he saw 415V he was wondering if he infact had more phases available.

clear piccy wanted


NT


Ignore BM, this is the right answer. You could well be right, there
might or might not be 3 phase available. If the current electrician
cannot advise, then you need someone who works on (small) industrial
sites. Sounds like perhaps the 3 phase meter has been taken out and
replaced with a single phase one.

If he (or I but I'm not up there) really wanted to know, it's easy enough to peek around and use a multimeter. But at the moment it's just a matter of interest for a possible future electric boiler installation. I was just wondering if houses ever had more than one phase installed or if you had to ask for it.

Some houses were supplied with three phases if there was an abnormally high load or a workshop attached with maybe three phase motors or welders.
In some cases if there were electric storage heaters. But his was for quite big houses.

The one previous owner did have an ironwork hobby with large equipment in the double garage with adjoining workshop.

But quite unusual.
You need to see if there are four wires entering the premises or two.
The cutout will have three fuses if it is a three phase supply.

I'm not there, but I was told what it looked like. There are no extra fuses or evidence of where they used to be. There is only one cable coming into the meter box through one hockey stick, and it's the same width as my single phase one. This leads to the master fuse, then two wires go through the meter from that, and an earth straight into the house. If there used to be three phases, it's been very well tidied up.

--
A military pilot called for a priority landing because his single-engine jet fighter was running "a bit peaked."
Air Traffic Control told the fighter jock that he was number two, behind a B-52 that had one engine shut down.
"Ah," the fighter pilot remarked, "The dreaded seven-engine approach."