My house had a new consumer unit fitted in 2005 it's partly fitted with RCBOs and partly with MCBs it was installed by the DNO who are SSE in this area bearing in mind the year it was installed are the rcd fitted likely to be electronic type or plain electromechanical ones I'm asking out of curiosity because if ever there's a fault in my workshop ( for this read that I make a mistake or an error when experimenting) usually the house RCD trips despite me having an electronic plug in one on my test bench supply which I think should fire first ide really appreciate your wise words on this thanks x Kelly
Thanks for the info Chris il be able( hopefully) to look up the details of my breakers on the inter web now I know what breed they are! Also Sparkingchip I've just ordered one of the 10mA RCD sockets should be here in a day or 3 OMG I've just spent £50 what am I doing!!!!
Look on the bright side, you may be able to use it as a designated socket for testing your loop tester and maybe your RCD tester as well if there is any sort of discrimination between it and the upfront RCD in the CU.
My modern kit is a FT817 transceiver with external solid state amplifier to give me 50 watts on all bands from 80 thru to 10 meters I also use it on VHF 50 and 144 Megacycles when I'm out on a local hilltop. The vintage kit is an old tektronics scope I'm trying to make work and an amplifier from an old dansette record player. Up until the weekend I also had device called an Edwards HF vacuum tester which was never mine but my mate let have a borrow of it. Who knows what interesting kit will come my way in the future. Kelly G1TGM
Hi I finally got a double socket with 10mA RCD it works great Interstingy it tripped when I plugged in my socket tester I measured its current consumption of it and it showed as 10 .2 mA so the new device is very sensitive it's now properly installed so I'm happy
Tomgunn the reason for my getting the 10mA RCD socket was because the house has RCBOs for all the downstairs socket outlet circuits BUT my little shack is right at the top of the garden around 60 feet from the house so if I trip the breaker in the house it's a walk down to reset it. Since I now am finding walking difficult it makes sense to try to avoide that happening
Hi I finally got a double socket with 10mA RCD it works great Interstingy it tripped when I plugged in my socket tester I measured its current consumption of it and it showed as 10 .2 mA so the new device is very sensitive it's now properly installed so I'm happy
I had a conversation several years ago with an electrician who installed a 10 mA RCD on a school science lab socket circuit and tried plugging his socket tester in.
I went to a house with RCD issues, two distinctly different problems with the same cause.
The installation is TT and has solar PV with battery storage, a ham radio station, hot tub and all sorts of other electrical toys.
Lots of DC currents plus rubbish electrical installation work.
The upfront 100 mA S-Type RCD kept tripping, the 30 mA RCD downstream of it “protecting” the solar PV and battery inverter was being blocked and would not trip, both issues were apparently being caused by the DC leakage current with both RCDs being Type AC.
The customer was more concerned about the RCD that kept tripping than the one that would not trip, in fact I seemed to be the only person concerned about the one that would not trip when I raised my concerns with the customer and the installers of the PV and battery system about the one that didn’t trip.
