Pretty pictures

[ban-all-sheds]

Required to give advice on wiring up ceiling roses or light switches?

Bored with those same old diagrams from diy-doctor?

Refresh the vitality and interest of your posts with different illustrations!

Seriously - I came across these last night, and jolly good they are too:

1) Wiring a rose:

And this page http://www.diydick.com/Electrics/electrical-content-pages/lighting-circuits.htm has an excellent set of drawings (too many to post) gradually building up from that to an entire lighting circuit, not only in schematic form but also illustrations to show what it really looks like with physical cables.

It also has this working model of 2-way light switching:

2) Wiring a ring main:

3) Wiring spurs:

In fact the whole electrical section http://www.diydick.com/site-main-button-index-pages/electrical-menu-frame.htm is well laid out, and the main site http://www.diydick.com has similar sections for plumbing, heating, decorating etc (some under construction, like my bl00dy fitted wardrobes.... )

Enjoy.

 

[masona]

Brilliance
This got to be the best I've ever seen so far,much clearer and easy to read,I have now stop scratching my head at last.

 

[yankey-sparky]

Well would you look at that... here I was under the mistaken impression that the two ends of a ring mains connected to two different breakers!

I understand now the two ends connect into just one breaker. That makes more sense. It also explained why this lets you use 2.5mm wire on a 32A circuit. Excellent reference site!

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Ring mains have their plusses and minuses.

It does mean you can support a 30/32A circuit with 2.5mm cable, but you have to be careful in the design, because you could in theory overload part of it if you had several sockets very near the start of one leg (unlikely in practice), and if you suffered a total break in the ring all of the sockets would still work, and you wouldn't know that you now had 2 radials with 24A cable and a 30/32A breaker.

It does also mean that if the earth wire drops out of a socket there's no "downstream" risk.

I guess if you wanted belt and braces you could wire a ring using 4mm cable....