The original (very generic) title):
Government to go “further and faster” in becoming energy secure
The Energy Secretary outlines measures to protect consumers and make Britain energy secure.
They are speaking of panels in the 800W range which you can just buy , mount in front of your balcony or on top of your carport, and plug into a wall socket.
These things are wildly popular in Germany. The do not generate a lot of power, but armotize in about three years and save real money. (Depending on how old the metering technology is, they can also make the power meter spin backwards, which I think is only fair considering how much households pay for kWh, compared to energy-hungry companies, which get most of the the massive cost savings from renewables but don’t pay for the necessary upgrade of the grid).
Your implication in how you wrote was that the appliances are at risk. However the built in fuses in the plugs should mitigate that
One thing about the old standards is that, as you said previously, it might trip more with less efficient devices, however it was also a case that it wasn’t trip switches, but fuse boxes with physical fuses. So it wasn’t just a hassle, they needed replacement at expense, and a dependency on adequate stock.
Those days are gone, so yes, modern standards should be updated.
No, the implication was that the in-wall wiring was at risk.
The fuses in BS1363 plugs specifically are not intended to protect equipment, btw. They are there to mitigate the risks of ringmain in-wall wiring, and to protect the appliance cable from catching fire in a short. (That’s why devices without a cable - e.g. wall-warts - don’t have the fuse.)
Appliances always need their own internal fusing if they are to be protected. A 3A slow blowing fuse in a BS1363 plug offers no protection at all to modern electronics (and even that assumes the householder didn’t just stick a 13A in because it was all they had to hand - the normal case.)
Yes, I understood your point. However, someone who has never seen a UK plug, or wasn’t aware of the fuse would not. That’s why I made it explicit. The main purpose may be to protect the wiring but my understanding is that the fuse does also protect the appliance, but yes, they should also have an internal fuse.
Are you saying the plug fuse offers no protection as they are already safer? I thought they help protect in case of a power surge or crossed wire. However it’s a long time since I looked at UK power supplies, lol (actually Ireland, but it’s the same, although I’m sure some regulations are different).
The fuse plug offers no protection because the average modern electronic (not electric - hairdryers etc.) appliance needs a much smaller fuse. 3A (the smallest UK plug fuse) is about 700W, at which point most things short of a kettle are already toasted. (That said, it’s not really clear what “protecting the appliance” means - you can’t push current, only pull - so if the appliance is drawing more than it should it’s probably already toast. What you actually need to do is hopefully stop any components in a broken appliance which may go pop and start a fire doing so - and transistors and the like can go all twisted-firestarter at 10s of mA, let alone 3A at 240V.)
Let me try to reiterate more clearly: The purpose of the socket fuse is the same as the purpose of ringmain wiring: to allow saving copper on cheaper cable.
The ringmain has a big flaw - unbalanced loads can overload the in-wall wiring, because it uses cable rated less than the breaker protecting it. Fuses in plug sockets help make it harder to unbalance the ring (because the most you can draw from any one socket is 13A, no matter how many extensions you string together.) In “radial world”, you have a 16A breaker on 16A wire, and all that happens if you trail extension leads together is you trip the breaker - so no need for a fuse in the plug.
Another flaw of the ringmain is that 32A breaker. If a device fails with a short, it can draw more than 7KW without the breaker tripping; that’s enough not just to burn the cable, it’ll weld the pins in the plug and socket. The fuse in the plug mitigates this - again, with radial wiring, no need, because the most you can draw is the 16A the socket is rated for without tripping the breaker.
The third helpful feature of the plug fuse was it allowed for cheaper appliance cable; think old-school lamps with essentially bell-wire cables. In the olden days in the UK there were dedicated lighting sockets (with round pins) for these, on a dedicated lighting circuit with a lower rated fuse in the distribution board - the house I grew up in still had a few of them - but with the move to BS1363 as standard, there needed to be a way to safely fit the new plug to those old lamps without burning the house down - the replaceable fuse allowed for this. It’s not a coincidence that the other (than 13A) common fuse sizes are 3A and 5A - those were the ratings of the two different round-pin lighting plugs which the new plug & socket replaced.
None of these purposes of the plug fuse is actually protecting the appliance; they are all about protecting the ringmain and the cable. The fuses in the plug are simply too coarse (3A, 5A and 13A, of which even the lowest is far too much for modern electronics short of gaming-rigs,) and the fuses too slow-blowing.
Ok, well clearly I’ve been misinformed, thanks for taking the time to explain in detail.