Hi all,
I hope this isn’t a silly question but I’ve just moved into a new home and have been told I have an old fuse box inside the property which I really should upgrade at some point.
i wondered if this old fuse box would still be compatible with an electric charger I want to have installed when I get a model 3?
thanks,
Teza
It's very, very, common for recommendations to be made to replace old, but perfectly serviceable, consumer units. The regs have changed a lot over the years, and the requirements for a modern consumer unit are somewhat more stringent (and make for a far more expensive unit) than used to be the case. It seems there are a generation of newer electricians around who ALWAYS recommend changing a CU whenever they do an EICR (used to be called a periodic inspection). My view is that a fair bit of this is aimed at generating income . . .
There's been a steady shift towards finding ways to increase the income of electricians by the IET over the past few years, introducing changes to regulations that fail to address fundamental problems (like poor workmanship) and creating what seems, at first sight, to be a never-ending stream of money making changes. Take periodic inspections, for example. For decades, every domestic installation has been supposed to have one of these not less than once ever ten years. It's primarily a safety inspection/test, and involves around half a days work checking and testing to see if the installation is still safe.
The periodic inspection process used to have four categories of non-compliance, things that need to be brought to the customer's attention. The highest two of these are the same, C1 and C2, where C1 is a fault so dangerous the electrician must isolate the supply and lock it off, to prevent the risk of fire or electric shock (these are pretty rare). C2 is similar, a fault that needs urgent rectification, but isn't so severe that there is an immediate threat to life. C3 is fault or non-compliance that doesn't mandate urgent work to rectify, but the customer is advised to get it fixed as soon as is practical.
C4 doesn't exist any more, but used to be far and away the most common category, as it described a safe and serviceable installation that complied with the version of the regulations that were applicable when it was designed and installed. That was a really useful category, as it reassured the customer that their installation was no less safe now than it had when it had been put in. Sadly, it's now a requirement that C4 not be used, and any "fault" that would have previously been a C4, like an old, but perfectly serviceable, consumer unit, now has to be coded as a C3, something that, IMHO, is completely unreasonable.
Getting back on-topic, as already mentioned, the best way to connect a charge point is to the tails coming into the CU from the meter. There should be no reason to disturb the old CU at all.
