Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Check Out What Is A Consumer Unit?

By Marie Wilson


Well it truly is the contemporary version of your old fashioned fuse box, and in the event you nonetheless have an old fashioned fuse box then you should look at replacing it as soon as achievable using a new consumer unit. Basically a consumer unit is an electrical box with circuit breakers in it that sits between your electricity meter and all of the other electrical circuits that are in your residence. It replaces what would once have been your old fuse box.

Why is it unique to your fuse box? Well having a modern consumer unit you may turn each and every power circuit off individually, where as having a fuse box you had to physically pull out each fuse. Nonetheless a modern day consumer unit does not have fuses in it, rather it has a series of miniature circuit breakers (MCB) or residual current device (RCD), which have lots of advantages more than fuses. The primary 1 getting that they are able to be repeatedly tripped out with out getting to be replaced, as if they trip out they can merely be reset.

The MCB are fundamentally little switches that are created to sense when there is an electrical fault and trip out the circuit just before the fault becomes a dilemma e.g. they are able to sense an unusual load and trip the energy circuit out before a cable overheats and catches fire. The residual current devices are designed to sense Earth faults and shield your entire house from electric shocks inside the event of a brief circuit, for instance would happen whenever you cut through the power cable of your electric lawn mower.

The residual present devices within your consumer unit sense such issues in milliseconds, and cut off the power so quickly that you are unlikely to obtain an electric shock. The circuit breakers come in various ratings significantly the same as your old fuses did. Nonetheless they are created to withstand the rigours of being repeatedly tripped. As when they're tripped they temporarily suffer a lot of heat on account of a current flow that is a whole lot higher than normal, and extra heat caused by the spark when the breaker actually trips out. So for this reason a great deal of MCB have a vacuum inside them.

The residual present device replaces the normal on/off switch in a fuse board. And whilst ordinarily there's only one within the unit, you could have mini RCD rather than MCB on the whole board. This is a basic overview of a consumer unit.




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