I'm about to rewire an empty house, with no electronic equipment or anything else plugged in or installed. Does this mean I can omit installing an SPD because the value of the equipment that could be damaged is less than the price of installing the device?
"For all other cases, a risk assessment according to Regulation 443.5 shall be performed in order to determine if protection against transient overvoltages is required. If the risk assessment is not performed, the electrical installation shall be provided with protection against transient overvoltages, except for single dwelling units where the total value of the installation and equipment therein does not justify such protection."
If not then when would this regulation ever come into play?
If the ultimate decider of whether to install an SPD is the value of items that could be destroyed and weighing that up against the installation cost, then the clearly the driving motivation behind the regulation is a financial one, which in my opinion should not warrant mandatory requirements - If the customer is happy to take the very low risk of his ipad and tv being fried by an overvoltage then surely that should be his decision to make, not the electrical regulators.
And why they would include this as a mandatory reg when only the customers electronic devices are at risk makes me think this is somekind of collaboration between insurance companies and regulators.
The difference between installing a new consumer unit with cert. goes from 300 to 400 to account for the SPD which is a lot of money where my customers are concerned and a 25% increase on the overall price of the job which is only being incurred because a beurocratic institution has deemed it a requirement because it's expensive to replace damaged electronic devices in the home? Why is that any of their business? Because of course they are actually running a business themselves and perhaps it's in their interests to include a superflous regulation.
"For all other cases, a risk assessment according to Regulation 443.5 shall be performed in order to determine if protection against transient overvoltages is required. If the risk assessment is not performed, the electrical installation shall be provided with protection against transient overvoltages, except for single dwelling units where the total value of the installation and equipment therein does not justify such protection."
If not then when would this regulation ever come into play?
If the ultimate decider of whether to install an SPD is the value of items that could be destroyed and weighing that up against the installation cost, then the clearly the driving motivation behind the regulation is a financial one, which in my opinion should not warrant mandatory requirements - If the customer is happy to take the very low risk of his ipad and tv being fried by an overvoltage then surely that should be his decision to make, not the electrical regulators.
And why they would include this as a mandatory reg when only the customers electronic devices are at risk makes me think this is somekind of collaboration between insurance companies and regulators.
The difference between installing a new consumer unit with cert. goes from 300 to 400 to account for the SPD which is a lot of money where my customers are concerned and a 25% increase on the overall price of the job which is only being incurred because a beurocratic institution has deemed it a requirement because it's expensive to replace damaged electronic devices in the home? Why is that any of their business? Because of course they are actually running a business themselves and perhaps it's in their interests to include a superflous regulation.
