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Sizing of RCBO

Hello All

I have been given the tasks of the sizing of an RCBO for 20 x 13A sockets, I am very new to electrical services design 

Obviously, the size of the RCBO will not be 260A  as this would assume all the sockets will be pulling 13A all at the same time which is very unlikely to happen

Is there a basic methodology for sizing an RCBO?

Many thanks

Parents
  • Further to that 100m2 per 30A circuit rule of thumb,  if the area served includes a garden, then the figures need a bit of modification. Adding a socket for the lawn mower may in a sense add an extra few hundred square metres to the area served, but the load does not scale.
    Note that sometimes it is preferable to avoid a 'one out- all out' tripping situation, and there may need to  be more circuits than load estimates alone would require, so that not all of it is lost if there is a fault on one segment. This is especially true if some of the loads are 'dirty' and my cause other loads to suffer from voltage drops( flickering/"brown out") In that case dedicated sockets for expensive computers may be separate from the general ones, if they may be used by the industrial cleaners,  gardeners hedge clippers, or anything that looks like a welding bay ;-)
    Note that in a modern building you do not need that many hundred watts per square metre before it starts to heat  uncomfortably,  and offices with lots of kit may actually need cooling rather than heating.
    Mike

Reply
  • Further to that 100m2 per 30A circuit rule of thumb,  if the area served includes a garden, then the figures need a bit of modification. Adding a socket for the lawn mower may in a sense add an extra few hundred square metres to the area served, but the load does not scale.
    Note that sometimes it is preferable to avoid a 'one out- all out' tripping situation, and there may need to  be more circuits than load estimates alone would require, so that not all of it is lost if there is a fault on one segment. This is especially true if some of the loads are 'dirty' and my cause other loads to suffer from voltage drops( flickering/"brown out") In that case dedicated sockets for expensive computers may be separate from the general ones, if they may be used by the industrial cleaners,  gardeners hedge clippers, or anything that looks like a welding bay ;-)
    Note that in a modern building you do not need that many hundred watts per square metre before it starts to heat  uncomfortably,  and offices with lots of kit may actually need cooling rather than heating.
    Mike

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