Electrical Regs in Ireland (Dublin)

Thank you all for your replies -


I suspect the following post is going to be a bit of a rambling post flitting from thought to thought in no particular order....


I spent all of Thursday getting here to Dublin.

What an adventure. By Road to Fishguard and Ferry to Rosslair. Up the coast to Dublin. There seems to be no  Traffic here! (I know I've only seen a small part of Ireland but Rosslair to Dublin was a pleasure to travel with no traffic in evidence. 


I am extending cabling in three compartment trunking (Marshall Tufflex too so I even have stock for that). I am using 2.5mm singles for all cores so should be OK. (Mine are standard, stranded singles) The Irish seem to use the same sort of cable as the Germans do, a toughened solid core flex, all cores the same size. 

The 3 phase commercial DBs here in Dublin are fairly similar in layout to German ones - being really wide and having stacks of MCBs on the left and right hand side of the board - with relays in evidence for the emergency lighting. (Bearing in mind that I have seen only one German and only one Irish 3 phase DB so this may not be indicative of every DB in either country) These were both in office environments in commercial office blocks. 

All of the power seems to be on  double pole RCDs the size of two regular MCBs put together. Like a single phase RCD main switch in the UK. 

All lights seem to be on MCBs. (In Dublin not evidently on RCDs but in Germany they certainly were on RCDS)

There is a 100Amp MCCB at the DB origin here in Ireland something simmilar in Germany. 

None of these boards look like a UK DB - in layout- and the German DB that I saw really liked to use multiple layers of split load board with an RCD main switch and say 10 ways of MCBs after that. stacks of them for a very small space. 

The light switches and sockets in Ireland are the same as for England. 

German Light switches and sockets are a whole different storey and a complete pain in the *** to me as I felt like a day 1 apprentice trying to fit them in............


This one particular - rather smart commercial office building in the centre of Dublin - has a shocking mess of cabling, which I doubt is indicative of Irish cabling practices but this whole building is such an electrical mess it is unbelievable. 


Kind Regards

I presume the cable you have seen used is NYM-J - it is a very common cable type in the south of Ireland.

Are we the only country that has reduced cpc (except 1.0 T & E). I wonder why we do that?

What is a hamburger 2 way switch Mapj1 ?

What is a hamburger 2 way switch

From memory, one light, two 2-way switches, but fewer wires than normal... each of the switches had L and N connected to L1 and L2 and COM to one side of the lamp (ditto for the other switch - mirror image as it were). When both switches "agreed" the lamp was fed with N+N or L+L so remained off, when they disagreed the lamp had L+N (or N+L) and so lit. If you happened to have a convenient source of L+N near each switch you only then needed a single wire from each switch to lamp to complete things.

   - Andy.

If you had bought some cable in Berlin I presume you could have used it up in Dublin?


Andy Betteridge

I also noticed that French sockets are shuttered.

Yes - as I understand it after generations of having unshuttered sockets, the French eventually decided that shuttered were safer - indeed were so enthusiastic about thie idea they incorporated the requirement not only into their wiring regs but the law of the land. As a result it's illegal there to install the international standard connectors for electric vehicles - because they use an electrical interlock system to make sure the power contacts are dead unless both ends are plugged in rather than simple mechanical shutters. So now they've had to develop a (pointless) shuttered version of the connectors just for France - apparently that was easier than getting the legislation fixed.


  - Andy.