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davesparks
“Suppose you TT an outbuilding, bonding the extraneous metal water pipe that originates (and so is bonded) in the main, TN-C-S supplied building. If we lose the DNO neutral, that pipe is going live along its length, both in the main building and the outbuilding, along with everything else bonded/earthed out there. Now we have the worst of both earthing arrangements, doubling the risk.”
That’s assuming that you are taking a metal pipe out there, and not poly, so in that case you would precautions to not let this happen.
The main reason why I am so strong for not taking PME outside, is when I did my 18th update, I was taking to an engineer who works for SSE, his job is to locate and fix, floating neutral faults on PME supply cables, he was very knowledgeable about this supply type. He could not state enough how dangerous it is under fault conditions, he even went on to say if his house had a PME supply, he would disconnect it and make his house TT.
I was also taught this when I was doing my 2330 lev3, my NVQ3 and my inspection and test.
I would put PME down as a C2 on an EICR if I saw that it was taken outside.
You cannot code an observation on an EICR based on your opinion, you can only code it according to bs7671. Currently there is nothing in bs7671 to support your suggestion of a C2 for a PME earth used for an outbuilding.
Yes PME has its downsides, but it is a very reliable earth connection for the vast majority of the time. You talk about it as if supplies to installations suffer neutral faults on a regular basis, they don't.