Consumer Units
A consumer unit is there for for the safety of your family and your home. It prevents faults from potentialy causing fire and to protect you from electric shock.
Some older properties still have old type fuse boxes with BS 3036 Rewireable fuses, although they have faithfully done their duty for many years, they cannot offer the same protection that is now available, especially in an ageing wiring system.
The new breed of consumer units brought along with the 17th edition wiring regulations consists of two RCD (Residual Current Device) units and Circuit breakers.
The idea is to have the whole system protected by an RCD, so if a fault should occur on one RCD protected circuit, it will not affect the rest of the circuits protected by the other RCD, in other words you wont be without power totally.
To comply with the regulations, the earthing arrangement will have to be upgraded too. This means upgrading the cable sizes entering the new consumer unit and the earthing cables leaving the new consumer unit to bond the water and gas pipes.
The meter cables will also have to be upgraded if the existing ones are not of the correct size.
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