British Expatriate Network

Just buy a decent UPS Rob and your troubles will be over as it will condition the power that goes into your computer. You can get them for less than $100 nowadays and the batteries are not too expensive when they die (about 2-3 years later if you use it all the time).

I put power conditioning on my home theatre and I know some folks that have uninterruptible power supplies for these too!

If I have a house built in the future, I will definitely have the lights on a separate circuit.

The friends of ours who worked with electrical stuff in the UK, bought a house that needed a lot of work doing to it. He totally redid the electrics - rewiring, new circuit board, labelled correctly etc., and did the wiring the UK way. When the inspection was done, the inspector commented that it was the best organized circuit board he had ever seen.

Yes, lights are on separate circuits. The circuit for the sockets (known as the ring main) is literally a circuit -it goes through the sockets then back to the fuse box and has a 30amp fuse (iirc). Large appliances need their own fuse (cookers, power showers etc). The lights have a much smaller fuse and do not need to be connected in a ring, they can just be in a chain. You would usually wire separate circuits for upstairs and downstairs, but often this is governed by how many fuses your box holds.

We rewired our house in the UK and I'm sooo tempted to do it here..... It just doesn't make sense to have the lights on the same circuit as the sockets, and they're so randomly assigned to a circuit. :roll: Beest and spent ages trying to work out which lights and which sockets are on which fuse.

And don't even get me started on the light with 4 switches 2 of which are either side of the front door....

Hey, apartment in gated community if you don't mind :smile:

Isn't that the PC term for the loony bin?

I know we didn't buy a house because on inspection and then further inspection it had this aluminium wiring that had pretty much crapped out and the whole stuff needed replacing. Apparently some time in the 60's to early 70's they had a bright idea to use aluminium instead of copper and it doesn't work so well so lights will dim etc. That said, the same thing happens here in my copper wired system.

Another thing, aren't appliances these days all made overseas for the cheapest possible price and therefore not quite up to the standards of 10 or 20 years ago?

Thing we've gone through is DVD players though admittedly one was a $40 no name and the other a $60 Phillips. Now on a $80-$90 Sony which has held up for over a year now!

To add to the electical bitching, I have an upstairs hall light setup (3 lights, one at top of stairs, one outside master bedroom and one outside the other two bedrooms) that has two switches upstairs and none downstairs.

There is a downstairs hall light you can switch off both upstairs and downstairs.

This setup strikes me as a bit odd. It is a real pain when you want to watch a movie with the lights down low and the last person downstairs has left the hall light on.

You're probably plugged directly into the strip love.

Hate the wiring here. I rewired my house in the UK but the thought of trying to do it here scares me to death lol.

Folks are on the money when they talk about the UK running circuits for say just lights in the Living room etc and the sockets are all looped in the room as well plus you are should not run more than additional sockets from each plug. Here it seems one add on after another. No wonder so many electrical fires happen here.

When we moved into our house we found that the circuits where overloaded,some wall connections on the window a/c's were smoldering when in use shock We had an electrician come in and upgrade to a new fuse box with separate 15 amp circuits to the a/c's, dishwasher,power tools,funace and sump pump.Since then (abt 35 years) we have had no electrical problems with our gadgets(touch wood) , but we do pop a fuse if too much is put on any circuit.

When I worked in Canada in plant engineering section any electrical tool or motor imported from the USA had to be upgraded to Canadian standards.

Therefore a good place to check out electrical stuff is maybe with the Canadian Standards Bureau?
I checked with them recently on some gas furnace heating info.

My last home in the uk was built in 1890 so i had to rewire have it rewired and updates when i bought it had no problems while i resided there .

This home is just 8 years old and all the fuses are individually marked so i know which one to swich of when im working the curcuits .

Most of the electical stuff has been upgraded or purchased since we moved in and other than light bulbs we hav,nt had any electrical equipment fail .

The microwave started to make a funny noise last year and we had to get a extra cover put on the exhaust chimney on the roof birds had slipped up under the rim and made a home there ,fell down the shaft and where going around and around in the motor , they were well and truly cooked when we eventually got to them .

We spent ages doing that last year and finished up throwing our arms up in defeat. We had lights in the small bedroom that were on the basement circuit and the outlet in our en-suite was on the kitchen circuit, these two rooms are on totally ooposite ends of the house and are katy-cornered to boot.
We have still never found out where the light swithes in the hallway, two outlets outside and two outlets in the living room are connected too. The circuits here have no rhyme or reason, they just put them on whichever circuit they feel like. In fact we reckon they messed em all up on purpose to keep their electrician union brothers in business! So you have to call electicians out all the time.

We had a deep fat fryer bought over from the UK and have a right bodge job of 'semi' wiring it.
In the Basement we have the washer dryer so we use the washer dryer big cajones plug socket. We had to lay some wrie from the kitchen where the fryer sits down through the floor to the basement where the socket is. When I use said fryer I have to unplug the dryer to use the fryer. Didnt even go anywhere near asking if we could buy an adapter so we could have both plugged in at the same time to save all the switching ( wouldnt have used both at the same time as that would have been asking for it)
Our Deep fat fryer looks so assinine with one of those giant industrial plugs on it.......peeps from the UK nearly pee themselves laughing when they see it :)

We havent overloaded ours yet.....we come near to it but we havent found any combination that will cause anything else to go off yet. A couple of dims now and then but nothing serious.
We do however have our computers and Tivo on UPS batteries as we have so many brownout in our neck of the woods that it isnt funny.

Amuurican leccie is crap AND expensive.

Mandy

OK.
For the unitiated, what is a UPS?
Also if I conect it to the computer and the router, does this mean that will continue to work to some degree in an outage.
We just switched to Vonage and if we have an outage we lose the router and thus the telephones.

Thanks for the advice Pilgrim.

Uninterrupted power supply - big battery or bank of batteries in a case that plugs into the mains and sits between your mains and computer.

It looks like a giant, bulky power adaptor (strip) as you plug the other stuff into it but not too much or it would overload the battery and not be of much use.

Usually, about half the plug sockets are battery powered and the other half just protect the connected equipment. I've got a Trip-Lite (Costco special) which has the monitor, computer and router/cable modem on battery protection and then everything else is on the other sockets.

I don't like my UPS much, compared to the APC ones we use at work but it's been very reliable for about four years at home and the battery hasn't gone on it yet.


This is the one I have at work - it is not bad and costs about $90 or less nowadays.