On Saturday, 29 August 2015 16:32:13 UTC+1, Tough Guy no. 1265 wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 15:25:50 +0100, Bob Minchin wrote:

Tough Guy no. 1265 wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 13:42:47 +0100, ARW
wrote:

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
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.

You don't need three phase for 415v - only two. And at one point it was
common to install two phases to allow electric heating.

Was that not split phase?

It is not the same thing as two lines from a 3 phase as you have 460V
on a
split line.

Rarer than a 15 year old virgin in Rotherham but they do exist.

This is in the Scottish Highlands and the house was built around 1985.
Is it likely to have two phases there? It's not in the middle of
nowhere, it's in a village with about 400 houses.

It is possible that the original owner had 3 phase installed complete
with appropriate meter to power his interests. A subsequent owner would
have then been faced with a higher standing charge and possibly reduced
options when shopping around for lower tariffs and so it would have been
economic (and possibly free) to have the meter changed to single phase.

The way to tell would be to look for three phase and neutral coming in
and the probability of two empty fuse carriers with wires going in and
none coming out.

One has to wonder at the abilities of the sparky who could not have seen
that for himself!!

I've just checked my own meter box, and my master fuse has a 415V rating on it! I definitely only have one phase. Very strange. Why would a master fuse need a 415V rating? If I had three phases, surely I'd have three fuses, one on each phase, so they'd still only need to be rated at 240V each.

--
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's intolerance.

Many electrical items are marked with the MAXIMUM voltage they are suitable for.
That doesn't mean that they are actually running at that voltage.