The problem is admittedly partly in trying to make sense of the regulations from a safety point of view, but it is also to make sense of them from a complying-with point of view.
So if I simply bulldoze ahead and bond where the plastic first turns to copper, then I might stand a reasonable chance of complying, but I would continue to have a house where the majority of the plumbing was only indirectly earthed. Hard to see how this now bonded section of piping was 'in general contact with the mass of the earth'.
Perhaps this does comply with the sense of the regs, if the idea is to provide a foolproof way of neutralising risk whenever a piece of metal enters the building. Perhaps this is exactly the point of the regulation? It is after all rather akin to what is done in a bathroom, the attention is on conductors entering the space without worrying too much about what is actually connected outside the bathroom, just that they enter it. Only in the case of plastic supplies, conductors do not in fact enter the protected space.???
I really hate to cite the on site guide on anything, but it does say that no services have to be bonded unless they are extraneous metal parts. Which gets us back to the accepted definition of an extraneous metal part?
Now what I really don't like is where it tells you to cross bond the lightning conductor. That sounds like a perfectly terrible way of bringing extraneous sources of voltage/current into an otherwise safe area. Lightning is perfectly capable of turning all that earthing into fusewire.
So if I simply bulldoze ahead and bond where the plastic first turns to copper, then I might stand a reasonable chance of complying, but I would continue to have a house where the majority of the plumbing was only indirectly earthed. Hard to see how this now bonded section of piping was 'in general contact with the mass of the earth'.
Perhaps this does comply with the sense of the regs, if the idea is to provide a foolproof way of neutralising risk whenever a piece of metal enters the building. Perhaps this is exactly the point of the regulation? It is after all rather akin to what is done in a bathroom, the attention is on conductors entering the space without worrying too much about what is actually connected outside the bathroom, just that they enter it. Only in the case of plastic supplies, conductors do not in fact enter the protected space.???
I really hate to cite the on site guide on anything, but it does say that no services have to be bonded unless they are extraneous metal parts. Which gets us back to the accepted definition of an extraneous metal part?
Now what I really don't like is where it tells you to cross bond the lightning conductor. That sounds like a perfectly terrible way of bringing extraneous sources of voltage/current into an otherwise safe area. Lightning is perfectly capable of turning all that earthing into fusewire.
