I`ve been thinking

I suspect some of it is the history. Prior to the ring, at least domestically, all sockets of significant load were on single point radials, one fuse, one cable one socket.

Light loads, like the wireless perhaps connected to a lighting circuit, either by 2 pin socket or bayonet adapter.

Which is fine for a house requiring up to about 3 sockets at 15A each.... then the complexity of the fuseboard starts to limit you and a lot of wire converges on it.

The ring was intended to allow a socket in each room and the ability to carry you (max 3 bars) electric fire from one room to another, as required, while eliminating extension cables under doors and yet not requiring one fused branch per room, and a requirement to sell the idea of being able to use apparently undersized cable, is that most sockets are fed from both sides, and an assumption that only one or two sockets at a time are fully loaded. Electrically speaking of course, so long as you can do good joints, there  is no issue with mixed radials rings, rings with all sockets as spurs, lollipops etc,  but you can see from the way they are not popular, that collectively electricians are by nature very wary of anything unusual.

It was necessary to get people away from the 'comfort zone' of wiring like previous practice which we would now recognize as a single point radial. Indeed to force people to think like this, for a brief period it was also recommended that the cores of the ring be unbroken. I suggest this is so impractical that it must have fallen shortly after the first attempt to actually thread one up.

To sell the idea of the ring without too much opposition it needed to be simple to understand, with simple rules, and underwritten in a sense by some authority. 

(Look at the number of folk who see a centre fed radial and imagine it is not permitted because there is not one shown in the OSG, or call it two circuits sharing a breaker to see how this happens.)


Once established as reliable, one can then relax the requirements a bit.

I suspect some of it is the history. Prior to the ring, at least domestically, all sockets of significant load were on single point radials, one fuse, one cable one socket.

Light loads, like the wireless perhaps connected to a lighting circuit, either by 2 pin socket or bayonet adapter.

Which is fine for a house requiring up to about 3 sockets at 15A each.... then the complexity of the fuseboard starts to limit you and a lot of wire converges on it.

The ring was intended to allow a socket in each room and the ability to carry you (max 3 bars) electric fire from one room to another, as required, while eliminating extension cables under doors and yet not requiring one fused branch per room, and a requirement to sell the idea of being able to use apparently undersized cable, is that most sockets are fed from both sides, and an assumption that only one or two sockets at a time are fully loaded. Electrically speaking of course, so long as you can do good joints, there  is no issue with mixed radials rings, rings with all sockets as spurs, lollipops etc,  but you can see from the way they are not popular, that collectively electricians are by nature very wary of anything unusual.

It was necessary to get people away from the 'comfort zone' of wiring like previous practice which we would now recognize as a single point radial. Indeed to force people to think like this, for a brief period it was also recommended that the cores of the ring be unbroken. I suggest this is so impractical that it must have fallen shortly after the first attempt to actually thread one up.

To sell the idea of the ring without too much opposition it needed to be simple to understand, with simple rules, and underwritten in a sense by some authority. 

(Look at the number of folk who see a centre fed radial and imagine it is not permitted because there is not one shown in the OSG, or call it two circuits sharing a breaker to see how this happens.)


Once established as reliable, one can then relax the requirements a bit.