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Outbuildings - multiple consumer units

Former Community Member
Former Community Member
Evening all,


In a situation where I'm shortly going to be rewiring a new house I'm moving into and am hoping someone can provide me with some clarity on the best way to provide power to multiple outbuildings. 

Essentially I had planned to install a main consumer unit indoors and then feed the outbuilding via an RCBO on this consumer unit, i.e. consumer unit to, twin and earth, to junction box internal, to SWA across the garden, to secondary consumer unit in outbuilding - repeat this 2 or 3 times to the various outbuildings I need power in. However when doing a bit of research on the subject there seems to be differing opinions on whether to do this or to install a Henley block at the main incoming supply and then come out of that with one feed to my 'main consumer unit' and another feed out to the 'secondary outbuilding consumer unit' or multiple consumer units. It never occurred to me that this was an option and frankly I'm in a muddle as to what the consensus is on best practice, some mentioning a Switched fuse also.


If anyone could give me their opinion on what the safest and best practice is i'd be extremely grateful! TIA
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    whjohnson:

    Chris,

    If you are defining the house CU as 'the primary distribution board, how can you provide adequate discrimination via mcbs only?

    Rather, I suspect you are saying exactly what I said!


    There shouldn't really be any faults in the fixed wiring if it is done correctly and not abused.


    Tripping off all of one of a series of outbuildings isn't the end of the world. A fault in any one distribution circuit would trip its MCB as intended, but the other ones would not be affected so there is some merit in having one distribution circuit per building as suggested by the OP although I see that the proposal has changed.


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  • 0
    whjohnson:

    Chris,

    If you are defining the house CU as 'the primary distribution board, how can you provide adequate discrimination via mcbs only?

    Rather, I suspect you are saying exactly what I said!


    There shouldn't really be any faults in the fixed wiring if it is done correctly and not abused.


    Tripping off all of one of a series of outbuildings isn't the end of the world. A fault in any one distribution circuit would trip its MCB as intended, but the other ones would not be affected so there is some merit in having one distribution circuit per building as suggested by the OP although I see that the proposal has changed.


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