BS 1363 13A Socket Continuous Max Load

Sparkingchip: 
 

A few years ago I went to the local German owned WB central heating boiler factory, they had gas boilers that had been running flat out on test for several years, I passed comment that they must never run short of hot water in the cloakrooms, the guy showing us around looked blank then said all the hot water is dumped.

It would seem appropriate to make use of gas and electricity used for testing. 

What an appalling waste of fuel. The boiler testing facility should have been near a hotel, hospital, industrial laundry, or other facility with a significant hot water demand.

Some of my customers who worked for the company before the take over when it was still locally owned had boilers fitted free in their homes to run as test pieces, but obviously never ran them flat out year on year.

The change of CUs was almost certainly due to another or two silly actions by various bodies. It's funny the plastic ones in shops do not seem to catch fire, and the supposed rate of plastic ones has now fallen to almost none, although a lot are still in use.  Direct evidence was never the forte of certain bodies, just tick boxes.

Broadgage, the energy wasted by having unreliable boilers would be thousands of times the amount used for reliability testing, whilst reliability is designed in, it is necessary to check that no “silly” mistakes have been made. I remember a case where I was involved, 5V 100A power supplies were used in a piece of equipment containing a lot of memory, and it used the full 200A for about 17ms and then only 40A for the next 3ms, ad infinitum. Many makes of these “standard” supplies failed quickly (an hour was good), yet one make was quite happy. After a long and difficult investigation, we found the problem, the switch-mode circuit tried to conduct the same half-bridge driver transistor twice in sequence when the core was nearly saturated and it basically drove a short circuit to the power rail causing very high current and instant failure. If you look at datasheets you will see that all the circuits for this switching function now have a section that stops this from happening, and thus they are then bombproof. A good example of why reliability testing is very important. You should see what happens to military equipment, however with the way things are now, perhaps used to be tested would be better! Those light tanks are a case in point, they should never have got to the end of the contract before they were seen to be undrivable due to crew failure!

Further to my previous post re a Kia “Granny Lead”.

The moulded on 13A 3-pin plug does have a fuse.

The depth of the plug, ie between the mounting face and the front face is 27 mm, whereas a MK Safety Plug has a depth of 24 mm. Not a lot in it, but the main difference is the size of the rather chunky moulded cable strain relief.

Regarding current draw, the Portable Charging Cable. (ICCB: In Cable Control Box) as described by Kia.  The user can select the charging current thus:

1. Check  the  outlet’s  current  rating before  connecting  the  plug  to  the outlet.
2. Connect  the  power  plug  to  the household electrical outlet.
3. Check the status of the control box display.
4. Adjust  the  charging  current  by pressing the button (1) on the back of  the  control  box  for  more  than 1 second. (Refer to the examples of charging  cable  type  and  charging current setting.)
5. Each time the button (1) is pressed, the  control  box  display  is  sequentially changed to 12A, 10A and 8A.

There is a table showing currents against Socket (Outlet) capacity:

For Outlet current  14 - 16A  ICCB Charge Level 12A

For Outlet current  13 - 12A  ICCB Charge Level 10A

For Outlet current  11 - 10A  ICCB Charge Level 8A

So for a UK 13A outlet, you should set to 10A , but would appear that if you are in Europe where they use Shucko sockets rated at 16A you can set to charge at 12A and similarly for 10A sockets you can select to charge at 8A. 

I have only used my Granny Lead on one occasion and I selected to charge at 10A. Whether there is an inbuilt charge limit set to correspond to the style of plug fitted, I do not know. With a 13A UK socket it is very tempting to charge at 12A.

Clive

A shucko socket is and as far as I know always has been  nominally 16A

The correctly engineered German ones (type F/Shucko) perhaps - but I'm pretty certain that many of the other types (French types C/E or Danish type K or whatever they used in Italy) had a long history of 10A types.

    - Andy.

Did the old M.K. 13 Amp plugs ever run hot?

MK 13A 3 pin plug (flameport.com)

Z.

Back in the days when 15 amp sockets were installed in homes, what domestic appliances were there that actually drew a full 15 amps?

Would we really have any confidence that this socket could carry a full 13 Amps reliably for any length if time?

Zoomup: 
 

 

Yesterday I once again replaced a B32 MCB supplying a 8.5kW shower with a B40, because it was running permanently overloaded, I frequently see this done.

But was it tripping off?

 

Z.

A customer has asked last week me to go to a house he rents out, because the B32 supplying the shower is tripping, I don’t know what the shower rating is, that needs to be checked.

Sparkingchip: 
 

Back in the days when 15 amp sockets were installed in homes, what domestic appliances were there that actually drew a full 15 amps?

An arc welder or pottery kiln. Or possibly a wash boiler sometimes called a “copper."

Z.