"Matthew Durkin" wrote in message ...

Also - I understand fully all the points that have been made on this forum,
especially the ones regarding carbon build up around where insulation is
breaking down etc. My point about the cable being cold was merely
observational!

its bound to be cold, once it gets to the stage of heating up there
would likely be a fire within hours.

point taken about the darwin award. I hope it doesn't come to that. I live
250 miles from my sister, and my dad works 12 hour shifts plus 2 hours
travelling. He's also got his floor up at the moment treating woodworm.
There's only so much we can do!

I think one of the most interesting things to come out of this long
discussion is that those who actually have some of this cable have it in
good condition. There are no sings of any decomposition of the cable at all
in this installation. I'm not saying it's good. But it has been running
fault free for maybe 70 years.

You cant assume its fault free, I think its more likely there are
leakage currents running here there and everywhere. On a 5A wire fused
circuit you would have to have more than 1.2kW dissipated by the cable
for a long time (like an hour plus) before the fuses would start to
think about blowing.

My Dad will be over at my sisters with a megger asap to see if there's any
imminent danger, and he'll also be ripping out the lead cellar lighting.
There will still be the laed feed into the house itself though, but at least
then we'll be in a better position to know how bad it is!

Right. If youre truly unable to do the work you could buy a reel of
flex and a few sockets and get yourself electricity to the rooms that
way. Crude, but if it were me I would not want to be running mains
down that old stuff, not for a minute. I think this would be much
better use of a couple of hours than trying to megger the
installation, when it cant have more than 1% chance of passing.

Even by 1930s standards an installation like this would be condemned.


Regards, NT