In article om,
"Dave Liquorice" writes:
On Sun, 31 Jul 2005 14:07:04 +0100, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

As has been pointed out, all flexes have to be capable of carrying
somewhat more than 13 amps as a fault condition.

Hum, 0.75mm flex (2192Y type stuff) is 6A rated. This is the very
common two core oval flex, you can get it in 0.5mm 3A as well...

Yes, and such flexs are limited to 2 or 3 metres so the
impedance is low enough to blow a 16A fuse/breaker within
a very short time in the event of a short circuit at the
far end, fast enough so that not only is the cable not a
hazard itself, but also so it's not damaged and could in
theory be safely reused.

Yes 0.75mm it'll carry 13A and only get a bit warm but a 13A fuse
takes quite a while to blow at twice it's rating and we are now
getting on for 5 times over that of the flex. I'm not convinced that a
13A cartridge fuse will blow before the flex gets rather to hot under
controled overload conditions rather than a dead short.

An overload implies the wrong flex is fitted.
For a short circuit, to get 26A in a 0.75m cable, the short
circuit would have to be 149m from the plug. Again, that's
much longer than an appliance flex is allowed to be.

--
Andrew Gabriel