18TH EDITION AMD 2

Humm, is there no indication of the changes?

 

I feel sorry for all the Landlords that are going to be forced into this by the new renting rules ( I think the law is a good one for safety of tenants) who are now going to be forced, with no choice but to spend £2k on a board that meets the 18th Amd 2

 I don't think they will - at least not for the present - as that Law doesn't refer to the current version of BS 7671, but specifically to the vanilla version of the 18th (BS 7671:2018) - later versions of BS 7671 won't apply under that law unless parliament specifically changes the wording (and apparently that's deliberate - they don't like the idea of "others" (e.g. the IET/BSI) being able, in effect, to change the meaning of the law. Judging by the ESQCR which still refers to the 16th Ed, parliament don't seem that bothered/able to keep things up to date.

 

Presumably it will be similar to when RCDs came in

Not entirely - when RCDs (or ELCBs) first came (and they were of course relatively expensive) you could have a high rated unit (63A/80A/100A) that covered an entire installation or at least a decent chunk of it - so the costs could be manageable (we still have split CUs). AFDDs seem to be different and for some reason seem not to scale up in the same way as RCDs do - AFAIK you simply can't get an AFDD rated much above 40A (not even in 115V parts of the world where they'd need circuits of twice the rating of ours for the same effect) - so installation-wide protection is required, there seems little alternative to a separate AFDD on each and every final circuit - which of course gets very expensive very quickly.


   - Andy.

Humm, is there no indication of the changes?

 

I feel sorry for all the Landlords that are going to be forced into this by the new renting rules ( I think the law is a good one for safety of tenants) who are now going to be forced, with no choice but to spend £2k on a board that meets the 18th Amd 2

 I don't think they will - at least not for the present - as that Law doesn't refer to the current version of BS 7671, but specifically to the vanilla version of the 18th (BS 7671:2018) - later versions of BS 7671 won't apply under that law unless parliament specifically changes the wording (and apparently that's deliberate - they don't like the idea of "others" (e.g. the IET/BSI) being able, in effect, to change the meaning of the law. Judging by the ESQCR which still refers to the 16th Ed, parliament don't seem that bothered/able to keep things up to date.

 

Presumably it will be similar to when RCDs came in

Not entirely - when RCDs (or ELCBs) first came (and they were of course relatively expensive) you could have a high rated unit (63A/80A/100A) that covered an entire installation or at least a decent chunk of it - so the costs could be manageable (we still have split CUs). AFDDs seem to be different and for some reason seem not to scale up in the same way as RCDs do - AFAIK you simply can't get an AFDD rated much above 40A (not even in 115V parts of the world where they'd need circuits of twice the rating of ours for the same effect) - so installation-wide protection is required, there seems little alternative to a separate AFDD on each and every final circuit - which of course gets very expensive very quickly.


   - Andy.