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Wiring sockets


Rtony
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My previous post about putting cable into conduit has been answered so I've started a new post.

I'm fitting sockets and a light in a room with the stone walls pointed and left bare.The room has a concrete floor and a pitched roof (so no ceiling to hide anything).

Am I right in doing the following:

Dig out a channel in the walls, deep enough to take the flexible conduit (and mortar), in a straight line all around the room, (over doors and across chimney breasts?). Using a fish tape pull the 3 individual cables through the conduit, put the conduit & cables into the channelled wall up to where the socket is required then do the next one and so on. Then fill the channel with mortar. When the mortar's set wire the sockets and attach them to the wall. Do I need to use a box buried in the wall to put the conduit ends in and connect the sockets to?

I want to use English 3 way light switches with metal patresses.

Tony

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Worms, can and tin opener.

You are in france, do it the french way, nothing else will do. If you insist on using UK metal patress boxes these will rust away with the lime.  In the event of a problem, fire or otherwise your insurance if you have it will be void.

Get yourself a book from a brico and copy what the pictures show if nothing else.  You are asking if you need to to use a box buried in the wall to put the conduit in, yes you do and the fact you have to ask is a very good clue to why you should not be doing this work until you are familiar with the French wiring system.

lecture over [geek]

 

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This book in English seems to get a very good write up:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Electricity-your-French-house-techniques/dp/221212712X

French electrics are very different to the UK and do use French components and not take over UK items. As has been said using UK items will invalidate your insurance and cause problems if you try to sell so you will have to have the wiring reinstalled to comply.

If you insist on doing things in France the UK way then you will be driving on the left hand side of the road and if your answer is no then it should also be a no to installing electrics the UK way
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Well, I got the answer to one part of the question anyway.

I won't be doing the work until I'm familiar with the french wiring system, that's why I asked.

When I bought my french house there was an old on off box next to the meter, wires of differing sizes went around the house on one run, cooker to lighting to switches etc, some switches wired with bell wire.

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Yes, existing wiring can be worrying.

The main differences to my mind are that there are no ring mains and that each major appliance, such as fridge, dishwasher, washing machine etc have their own circuits.....in fact in some ways I think the French way is better than the UK way.
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Whilst not disagreeing with the ideal that everything used in the house should be sourced in France, the "you will have to put it right before its sold" bit I have not yet seen proved. Here, I have been involved with the sale of 2 houses owned by Brits who wired the house with UK plugs and French plugs. In one house, the wiring was so bad that the wires went into the front of the mcb box so the cover would not fit. The wire arriving hung festooned off the basement ceiling in huge loops. All the sockets in the kitchens were UK. Both houses have sold in the past 3 years, both had diagnostics and neither had to be "put right" before the sale. I had a similar discussion with a gaz installer who ranted about a boiler being CE not NF, therefore unacceptable. I took him out to the Butagaz citern, asked him where the NF was and showed him where it was made - Peterborough UK!
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If what Lehaut has said were not true, a lot of us wouldn't have ended up buying properties with defective/dangerous wiring, regardless of where the materials were sourced. I don't recall anyone raising the matter of wiring when we bought and some of it (including some that had been installed only a couple of years previously by a local electrician) was not in accordance with any regulations I have since seen.

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  • 2 weeks later...
[quote user="PaulT"]Yes, existing wiring can be worrying.

The main differences to my mind are that there are no ring mains and that each major appliance, such as fridge, dishwasher, washing machine etc have their own circuits.....in fact in some ways I think the French way is better than the UK way.[/quote]

Having once spent an entertaining 4 hours trying to track down a neutral to earth short in the UK, I can certainly attest that double-pole mini breakers are a damn sight better idea than their

English single-pole counterpart. A neutral bus rail makes no sense at all and is just plain

penny-pinching!

p

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That's a discussion that will ramble on and on,  There really isn't an alternative way for the French as they don't have fused plugs.  They wire similar to UK industrial setups.  One thing for sure is they us a lot more cable their way.

Now I am informed that double pole breakers were used many years ago but they may have been made slightly differently.  The reason they are not use normally is that when you break two poles at once a spike of electricity can happen and in the past this caused one pole to weld itself which meant the operator believed they had shut off the power to the whole circuit but they may have not tested it and received a shock, so they only break the live now.  Obviously times have moved on but the UK way has remained.

Not sure how that would have affected your neutral to earth problem though? still a laborious task to go through the wiring to locate the fault. 

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I may be wide of the mark here, but I understood the 'welding-on-break' problem was a function of high-current DC circuits, which would/could throw huge arcs on high load.  - This was the spur to the industry designing spring-loaded switches which 'flip' from one state to another. Although, having said that, even with modern flipping switches, you can still generate a significant zap from a large capacitive load like - say - a lighting circuit with lots of fluorescents.

I take it you mean that the live pole might weld, while the neutral would open normally?   This is why the electricity boards stopped fusing both the L and the N feeds on their side of the meter (a state which was common - on MANWEB at least - in the 50's-60's). If the N fuse blew, then 250v would be detectable all the way round the house's circuits right back to the consumer side of the N fuse. Not something you wanted, especially when earthing and double-insulation on all appliances was generally an aspiration rather than an assumption!

As for that N-E fault... at least on a French board you simply kill all the breakers and restore the 30mA DD, then restore the breakers one-by-one until the culprit is found. In the UK, the only way is to physically disconnect each N from the bus-bar, and on a badly installed box with the cables tortured into position, it's not a pleasant task !

p

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