I think i've flipped up
I was under the impression we use the Brown Blue and Green/Yellow help with colour blindness (most common green and red)
I know it's to bring UK in line with EU. But why did EU use them colours.
Because I understand green earth (CPC)
Red Live (line) [hot colour]
(Forgive any misspellings Dyslexic and hard to see , also miss out works as forget to type them)
My feeling has always been, why they changed the colour system, was because they can! I guess someone said oh dear... lets upset electricians' BUT HOW? Ah!! Lets throw our weight around and change the RYB to BBB. Someone probably won an award for it, somewhere!
No, they changed it so that many countries could then all use the same scheme. You can of course debate whether the pain of transition was worth the gain of harmonisation, but there was a real motivation for it, not just "because they can".
Now there speaks some-one who has never worked abroad or had to interface to local electrics there. Standardization of colours between countries has slowly reduced things like incidents of shocks and destroying containerized equipment by mis-wiring it when it arrives in country.
My father saw a colleague killed in about 1970 by a UK sparks putting a UK plug on a German submersible pump and assuming red was live and black was neutral - having cut the Schuko plug off and thrown it away he just put a UK plug on it assuming the UK use of the colours. The unfortunate colleague picked it up and walked into a salt water tank with it to put it in position, and then after a cheery wave to do so it was switched on...
Mike
Well you're wrong! I've worked on the electrics in my daughters French farm house, a few times! All the wiring is 'radial' SO... I guess / oh dear we MUST all start wiring in 'radials' so as NOT to confuse any EU electricians' working here, haha - JOKE! There is, for me, NO excuse for changing the colours! You say someone died because of the colours... I can bet you that more died BECAUSE they were changed!
It's not like the colours were fixed from time immemorial.
Also, something was in place when the colours changed in 2004, which had not been in place previously when colours changed ... the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989. In fact I don't remember hearing a report on someone becoming injured simply because wiring colours changed just under 20 years ago ... Granted, there's still time, but you'd have to breach legislation and not be following guidance already in place prior to the colour change, and that wouldn't really be an issue with identification colour alone.
Finally, I always thought it was nonsense having two parallel standards, one for appliances, equipment and their flexible cables, and another set (which I thought back in the 1980s was "outdated") for fixed wiring to which they were connected.
There's also change in other areas. For example, I haven't seen any complaints when the colour of the Emergency Stop sign changed from red (under BS 5499) to green (under BS ISO 7010) back in 2012. (The latter making far more sense, as green is supposed to mean "the safe thing to do", "the safe path", "to make it safe" etc.
I'm aware of some expensive blue/black errors here with 3 phase in the year or so immediately after the change over - indeed I witnessed one in which a row of shower cubicles got given 415 volts instead of 230, being wired between brown and black instead of brown and blue, but it is hard to see how that would actually lead to an electrocution - unlike the red/green thing.
It is amusing that France, nearer to Germany than we are, now use red as a live colour in fixed wiring, and we have desisted, but there we go.
Indeed it seems they have gone out of their way to do somethnig odd, as black and red were earthy colurs back in the day. Gallic shrug ?
This extract describes the recognition colour use in older places wired before 1970.... my translation.
La norme NFC 15-100 n’étant pas encore appliquée, les électriciens utilisaient fréquemment ce code de couleur (d’autres codes sont néanmoins possibles) :
I'm so glad I worked in Germany and UK not France ;-)
M.
For example, I haven't seen any complaints when the colour of the Emergency Stop sign changed from red (under BS 5499) to green (under BS ISO 7010) back in 2012.
Found it at last!
I think that all my machines have green for go and red for stop. So if the stop button is now green, is the go button red? Rather like the indicators on MCBs, etc.
And let's not even think about traffic lights! For pedestrians, cyclists, and various birds (plus horses in Newmarket), green means that it is safe to cross and red that it is not (or might not be), but for motorists, strictly speaking, red means do not pass.
La norme NFC 15-100 n’étant pas encore appliquée, les électriciens utilisaient fréquemment ce code de couleur (d’autres codes sont néanmoins possibles) :
Which basically says do what you like: The standard NFC 15-100 no longer being applicable, electricians frequently use this colour convention (other conventions are nonetheless possible).
(My translation, not Google's ;-) )
La norme NFC 15-100 n’étant pas encore appliquée, les électriciens utilisaient fréquemment ce code de couleur (d’autres codes sont néanmoins possibles) :
Which basically says do what you like: The standard NFC 15-100 no longer being applicable, electricians frequently use this colour convention (other conventions are nonetheless possible).
(My translation, not Google's ;-) )
Google suggests "NFC 15-100 standard has not yet been applied" rather than "no longer being applied". AFAIK NF C 15-100 is still the current standard in France (as BS 7671 is here) - but likewise is subject to amendments and new editions over time.
- Andy.
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