It would appear that third party less than qualified and experienced individuals are being engaged as clipboard warriors to audit new EV charger installs.
Is there a publically available list of OLEV appointed EV charger installation auditors somewhere online?
Something smells very strongly of fish, and it isn't the charger units.
Cannot comment upon individual cases, but for a flavour -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpdja4NTvNQ
Comments welcome.
The single dwelling unit exemption is rather subjective. Who decides whether or not protection is justified? Presumably the customer.
From memory, I think guidance suggests that if the value of the installation protected is less than 5x the cost of the SPDs then it's reasonable to claim they're not justified. Just a rule of thumb of course, but something of that ballpark.
The risk assessment in 443.5 is, IMHO, not fit for purpose and it will be interesting to see what next week brings. What I want to know is: (1) the chance of a significant overvoltage over say, 5 years; (2) the chance of it leading to damage; (3) the cost of protection; and I can work out (4) the value of the equipment to be protected myself. To justify protection, (1) x (2) x (4) needs to be higher than (3).
Even if (3) is very low (especially if a new CU is being fitted), the cost is not necessarily justified.
I'd certainly agree that the RA isn't at all clear about how it works - I especially find the 10x difference between 'urban' and 'suburban' and no difference between 'suburban' and 'rural' very curious. Also I'm still not sure whether the cable lengths are meant to cover just the cable that runs directly between the installation from the source, or the whole network (including that downstream of where my installation is tee'd off from the main) - if it's the cables acting as an "aerial" you would have thought it would be the latter, but examples seem to imply the former, and the wording seems unclear.
I'm in two minds myself. In the last 10 years or so, I've had one boiler PCB go phut, another part of the boiler with electronics in it go phut, twice, an ADSL modem start misbehaving and need to be replaced, and the ballasts of several LED fittings fail, one RCBO and a CCTV camera. Some of those did seem to be about the time we had thunderstorms or when the distribution cable in the street went bang. Now whether any of that could have been prevented by SPDs I don't know. But if even half or a third of those failures could have been prevented, it probably would have been well worth while financially, and more so from a convenience point of view. If I were to add £20k or £30k of EV packed with electronics to the system I might well err on the side of safety as it were.
I'm been mulling over installing SPDs just to see if they make a difference. The difficulty I have is that I have 'entry points' all over the place - Electric enters in the cellar, Phone & TV at 1st floor level and PV through the roof. Had I thought about SPDs when originally designing everything I might have tried to bring everything in through a common point, but it's too late for that now. I have a fear that doing half a job (e.g. SPDs on the mains but not phone/TV/PV) could actually make things worse rather than better (I had a bad experience years ago with surge-protected PC with a modem and an unfortunate PBX), so it's all still on the 'things to ponder' list.
- Andy.
The single dwelling unit exemption is rather subjective. Who decides whether or not protection is justified? Presumably the customer.
From memory, I think guidance suggests that if the value of the installation protected is less than 5x the cost of the SPDs then it's reasonable to claim they're not justified. Just a rule of thumb of course, but something of that ballpark.
The risk assessment in 443.5 is, IMHO, not fit for purpose and it will be interesting to see what next week brings. What I want to know is: (1) the chance of a significant overvoltage over say, 5 years; (2) the chance of it leading to damage; (3) the cost of protection; and I can work out (4) the value of the equipment to be protected myself. To justify protection, (1) x (2) x (4) needs to be higher than (3).
Even if (3) is very low (especially if a new CU is being fitted), the cost is not necessarily justified.
I'd certainly agree that the RA isn't at all clear about how it works - I especially find the 10x difference between 'urban' and 'suburban' and no difference between 'suburban' and 'rural' very curious. Also I'm still not sure whether the cable lengths are meant to cover just the cable that runs directly between the installation from the source, or the whole network (including that downstream of where my installation is tee'd off from the main) - if it's the cables acting as an "aerial" you would have thought it would be the latter, but examples seem to imply the former, and the wording seems unclear.
I'm in two minds myself. In the last 10 years or so, I've had one boiler PCB go phut, another part of the boiler with electronics in it go phut, twice, an ADSL modem start misbehaving and need to be replaced, and the ballasts of several LED fittings fail, one RCBO and a CCTV camera. Some of those did seem to be about the time we had thunderstorms or when the distribution cable in the street went bang. Now whether any of that could have been prevented by SPDs I don't know. But if even half or a third of those failures could have been prevented, it probably would have been well worth while financially, and more so from a convenience point of view. If I were to add £20k or £30k of EV packed with electronics to the system I might well err on the side of safety as it were.
I'm been mulling over installing SPDs just to see if they make a difference. The difficulty I have is that I have 'entry points' all over the place - Electric enters in the cellar, Phone & TV at 1st floor level and PV through the roof. Had I thought about SPDs when originally designing everything I might have tried to bring everything in through a common point, but it's too late for that now. I have a fear that doing half a job (e.g. SPDs on the mains but not phone/TV/PV) could actually make things worse rather than better (I had a bad experience years ago with surge-protected PC with a modem and an unfortunate PBX), so it's all still on the 'things to ponder' list.
- Andy.
Agree Zoom, problem is; they prefer to transfer the risk to the installer instead.
Personally, I don't think that the VORs fitted in domestic consumer units are really up to the job in any case. To me it's akin to sprinkling glitter on a turd simply because you can't polish it. If there really is a high risk of a spike in the external supply, then that is where the prevention measure should lie and not after the fact.
The picture shows what is sometimes called a PABX Master. It is intended for an office environment after a PABX where the spark gap arrestor would have been on the incoming line. The pcb has the location of the spark gap arrestor shown as SP1
Clive
Money makes the world go around. BT sockets already have an arrestor inbuilt. An old example....
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/221612544427
Z.
Whilst it WAS true that your phone socket DID have an arrestor (at least between lines), the NTE5 outlets do NOT have the arrestor in. The cheaper cost arrestors affect VDSL line speed, and therefore were not included in those outlets.
However, even if you have an older outlet with an arrestor (most are swapped out when you go to VDSL2 to achieve the line speed required), that isn't guaranteed to protect stuff connected to your home network, because to do that you'd need SPDs between phone lines and local PE of your mains supply (the MET preferably).
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