Andrew Gabriel wrote:

In article ,
"Sparks" writes:

In an office, where there is a small garden, are the sockets that are
supplying the office with a door to the garden *Required* to be RCD
protected?


No.


Ignoring the garden completely, is the any requirement to have RCD
protection in the office at all?
(Office contains the usual officey things, such as PC's lamps, franking
machine, photocopiers, binding machines etc..


No, actually it's rather unusual to do so IME.


The reason I ask, is, the office I am working in at the moment has
approximately 30 PC's


If there are more than around ~5 or so on one circuit, it should
be wired with high integrity earthing.


It has three consumer units, all with MCB's and isolator switches.

Another issue is, the radial circuit feeding the server rack will trip when
the UPS is initially turned on, so I feel the wiring may not be up to
standard!


Is that an MCB or RCD? UPS's (good ones at least) often draw
almost no current when first switched on. They tend to wait for a
bit to see if the supply is going to stay on before they start
drawing their normal load or switch over their outputs. As such,
they are very nice loads with regards to power up surges.

Almost ALL equuipment that does voltage concversion will either have a
thwacking great iron cored transformer wih may take a HUGE current if
you switch on at the wrong part of tghe cycle, or a thwacking great
capacitor across the mains with just some rectifiers in series to make
it DC.

Both can easily trip an MCB.