Might I just say that although this house was built in 1939, it was built
using 13 amp sockets on the old rubber and fabric covered wires, including
earth. I could not say if it was ring main or not, or much else but I can
tell you that the lights did not have unstitched lives in the rose. There
were also a smattering of 2 pin 5a sockets as well, apparently wired to the
one lighting circuit. All the 13 amp sockets were on one circuit. Of course
the old consumer unit used wire fuses, and was made of metal.

We had the place rewired in the 70s and then we had split upstairs and
downstairs circuits, all the sockets were raised up above the skirting and
all were on ring mains, but oddly, the bar fires in the bedrooms were on
the lighting circuit, not the socket one. In one case it was spurred off
the ring though as it was basically an afterthought.

Apart from the colours being wrong for today and the old circuit breakers
instead of the more sophisticated fault protection of today, its in very
good condition still.
Brian

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This newsgroup posting comes to you directly from...
The Sofa of Brian Gaff...

Blind user, so no pictures please
Note this Signature is meaningless.!
"Clive Page" wrote in message
...
I just watched another of Tim Hunkin's excellent videos - this one is on
connectors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q43tZ6DjuIE

One of the connectors he deals with is the UK 13A power plug. He claims
that it was introduced in about 1947 because of the copper shortage. The
reasoning is that there was a post-war housing boom - I expect that a lot
of existing houses also needed re-wiring - but that the conventional way
of doing this by running a cable from the fuse-box to each separate mains
socket was deemed wasteful of copper. So someone invented the ring-main
which generally used less cable. The problem was that the ring-main fuses
had to be larger and so the system wasn't as safe. The solution was to
put a fuse in each plug-top and this made them much larger. Does that
sound a reasonable explanation?

In fact I can just recall the old 15 amp 3-pin plugs which preceded them
and I don't think they were all that much smaller even though they were
fuse-less. In North America they don't seem to worry much about safety
given their lower mains voltage, but what about mainland Europe - do they
use ring mains with their fuse-less plugs or does each socket have a
separate run back to the fuse-box? I have never thought to enquire.


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Clive Page