What should I do with a new crabtree loadstar board.

[oscar21]

Not sure whether I've asked this or not before but the long and short of it is a while ago I needed to fit a crabtree board at short notice and as I hate using my phone to order stuff I managed to click on the older Crabtree stock which had the AC RCD's in them. I didn't even notice until I'd installed it all and came to fit the RCD's back in (I take everything out when dressing the cables). To remedy it I just bought the same board with type A RCD's and swapped them over but now I'm left with a brand new loaded dual RCD (A/C) board.

The annoying thing is just the RCD's alone are at least £45 each everywhere I look but you can buy a loaded board for £80 so it doesn't make sense to just buy two new RCD's and swap them. I'm not throwing it away as there isn't anything wrong with it but I'm getting sick of seeing it in my kitchen cupboard.

Is there any scenario where it can still be fitted? I suppose I could take everything out and convert it to a RCBO board but the Crabtree RCBO's are just about the most expensive you can get so I doubt I'll be doing that any time soon.

 

[westward10]

Purely resistive loads such as storage heaters.

 

[oscar21]

Purely resistive loads such as storage heaters.

I still don't get all this DC leakage stuff, even if a storage heater was connected to an AC RCD, if say solar panels were fitted to a separate board why would the DC leakeage not affect the AC RCD, its all ultimately connected together at the meter tails. Or is it considered only a problem is the circuit with DC leakeage is directly fed via the RCD.

If that's correct then why cant we still fit AC RCD's for most circuits and a type A/B RCD for a car charger and solar cells. Things like electronic power supplies in downlights and phone chargers etc have been around for decades and it was never deemed a problem then. I was fitting electronic downlight transformers in the mid 90's which I'll bet were a lot more dodgy than the stuff we fit today.

 

[littlespark]

I think it it’s only now that problems are being discovered, and the time taken to develop the newer type A

At first, they didn’t think having an RCD mainswitch feeding the entire installation would be an issue… but they soon changed their minds…

Cynics might think the regs are written by people in the RCD making industry and are doing this just to get more sales…

 

[brianmoooore]

What's happening in countries such as France, where TT is the norm, with upfront RCDs? Still type AC (or equivalent) or are they recognizing the as well?

 

[timhoward]

What's happening in countries such as France, where TT is the norm, with upfront RCDs? Still type AC (or equivalent) or are they recognizing the as well?

What I find a little bit interesting is that there was an era of MFT's e.g. Robin, early Kewtech that tried to do non-trip loop tests using D-Lok, deliberately injecting DC current to prevent the device tripping.
As time progressed and devices improved, my recollection is that it simply stopped working, almost all RCBOs and more recent RCDs refused to be fooled. They were all type AC.
It's all anecdotal stuff but I can't help wondering - a machine is actively trying to stuff DC into a device and it doesn't affect it's propensity to trip, so how big is this problem in real world terms? (I accept that older devices are susceptible)

It's also amazing how many type AC RCBOs still trip if you do a type A test with the extra 6ma of DC. I think I still stand at one failure and it didn't work on type AC either!

Cynics might think the regs are written by people in the RCD making industry and are doing this just to get more sales…

There was a FOI request related to this, and they wouldn't name names, only the umbrella organisations the JPEL committee members were represented by. They all show up as members of other organisations, like Electrical Safety First, and Lighting Industry Association even though it's common knowledge they also work for 'well known device manufacturers'
The lack of transparency doesn't help to reduce the cynicism!