Latest / The Electrical Show / Thomas Nagy and Paul Meenan look into diverted neutrals in 2023
Transcript
- 0:01The Electrical Show with Thomas naji sponsored by Boss Professional Powerful Power Tools, measuring
- 0:07tools and Experts Accessories. Right, Welcome to the Electrical Show. I'm Thomas
- 0:14Najie with Paul Meanan and on today's show we are going to be talking about
- 0:19diverted neutrals. Now, if you've been following this on social media and the
- 0:24liking load that this was, it was recently discussed in Parliament as it was
- 0:28worn that the instance which sort of surround diverted neutrals, they're saying it's going
- 0:33to increase around eightfold. So it's a massive problem on the back burner and
- 0:37it's sort of slowly becoming the front burner problem. It's really an issue,
- 0:42and there's been incidents already. There's a house fire in Birmingham last year,
- 0:45and there's fears that like gas meters can become sort of deadly devices with diverted
- 0:50neutral currents flowing through gas pipes and meters in our street and all the rest
- 0:54of it. So Paul and myself today Hello Paul. By the way,
- 0:58hello, I noticed we're both wearing great sexy great shirt. They actually we
- 1:02were quite fashionable. We do, yes, we do. Sorry, looking
- 1:03very trim actually on the Verio machine in the gym. Now, gymm,
- 1:07I've been trigging through Germany. That's a whole nother story that could take a
- 1:11whole show. We need a fixed radio after hours. I think that'd be
- 1:14an awesome podcast. My misery in Germany last week to tell us about it?
- 1:19What now? Yes, the whole nation a bridge. So I went
- 1:22to Germany last week for work to look at a brand new type of lift.
- 1:26I got to Heathrow at seven am. Flight was eleven. I got
- 1:30bumped. I got to Germany at half ten. I had to sleep on
- 1:33the floor of Frankfurt Airport. I had to wait till nine am to get
- 1:36my higher car to drive two hundred miles to a hotel. Lost your luggage
- 1:38as well? I lost my luggage. I had to get to a hotel
- 1:42that was following Nice Mark, which appeared at first to be some sort of
- 1:46weird swingers resort, but luckily I was the only one there. I then
- 1:49got to the factory to have the mickey taken out of me for wearing the
- 1:53same clothes for two days. Then had to go and buy clothes, which,
- 1:57unfortunately, due to my fashion sense, didn't really fit very well,
- 2:01then spent a week doing twelve hours and building this lift and doing the assurance
- 2:07for it, to realize that most of the restaurants shut at nine o'clock so
- 2:09didn't eat very well. And then when I was leaving, they then asked
- 2:13me to pay for everything, including flights, and basically I ended up with
- 2:16this massive bill and lost luggage. It was hell on Earth Oho. Then
- 2:21you got back to Heathrow where your luggage was still waiting for you. Yes,
- 2:24yes, so your luggage never left the UK four hour weight, yes,
- 2:29and lots of insistence and politeness, but it was an experience. For
- 2:32some reason, every time I go abroad to work it turns into some mad,
- 2:37stupid story of misery and woe and spending eight hours on a marble floor
- 2:40in an airport in a country where you can't speak the language ain't fun.
- 2:45Wow, we're moving a laugh at my misery. Ever, a one at
- 2:49work has fixed radio time to crack on. Hi. I'm Thomas Nagie with
- 2:54Paul Meanan here on the Electrical Show. And if you just tuned in,
- 2:58don't worry relax. We are just started and we're talking about diverted neutrals Now,
- 3:04obviously it's a topic people keep on hearing it, and so we're going
- 3:07to sort of just quickly clarify the ins and outs of what actually diverted neutrals
- 3:14is. So I'll do my best to explain how I see it, and
- 3:16then Paul is going to pull my pands down and correct me and say it's
- 3:20completely wrong, and then he'll tell you all naturally. So my understanding is
- 3:23that let's take a TNCs system, so you have it's actually quite interesting.
- 3:29Actually, I sort of come up with my own question right just when I'm
- 3:31thinking about this. You have your supply cable which comes in and the TNCs
- 3:36system. As far as I'm sort of aware of it, the cable itself
- 3:39has strategically placed earth rods kind of all the way back to the transformer.
- 3:46Yes, and if the neutral and earth break before that first rod, then
- 3:53you've got a divert in neutral problem because the power comes in, but it
- 3:57can't go out that way, so it basically turns around, it goes back
- 3:59into the home. So trying to find a path anywhere it can possibly go,
- 4:02yeah, a little bit more complex than that, but yeah, I
- 4:05mean, the multiple earthing in theory should help mitigate any step voltage is or
- 4:11any issues that could arise to danger if the cables are multiplely earthed. Because
- 4:15in college we were always taught oh yeah, every fifteen or thirty meters or
- 4:18at a joint or at the substation, it's earthed. I've only recently,
- 4:24in the last few years, started to see them chucking in copper rods when
- 4:27they're doing joints, chucking them into the pit, not driving them into the
- 4:30ground, and then just compacting them back. And I know from conversations with
- 4:33guys who work at DNO's there was a big whoh over they should have been
- 4:38at every joint putting in an electrode and weren't. But it's basically between the
- 4:43house and the first rod, the first earthing point, because if it happened
- 4:46after the first earthing point, there'd still be at There's still be a part
- 4:51I mean a joint. Yeah, No, it's it's it's it's kind of
- 4:55let's take you back. So divert neutral current is I'm just trying to explain
- 4:59it for the listener as well. So diverting neutral current is where current that
- 5:02originates not from your installation but from the network. So the DNO or the
- 5:08Dso the people who supper electricity when their life goes into a building and comes
- 5:13out as a neutral, and it should all work beautifully in this wonderful utopia.
- 5:16When something goes wrong, like a cable being over seventy five years old
- 5:19and a joint fails, that neutral has got nowhere to go. So what
- 5:23it will do is it will then, rather than coming back through your house,
- 5:26it will look for alternative paths. The inherent danger in linking the neutral
- 5:30and earth because in theory it's a great system, But when the neutral and
- 5:34earth fails further up the line, then your earth will then be effectively,
- 5:39I'm going to use a phraser contaminated with neutral current, so there's no real
- 5:43difference between your neutral or earth. You could actually consider earthing to be a
- 5:46line conductor, which is a whole head mess in itself, because we weren't
- 5:50all that in college. And it will divert through your installation. Now it
- 5:55can go either way. It can be imported or exported, so you can
- 5:58have energy come up up your gas meter from somewhere further down the road and
- 6:02through your earth bar and in through your cable, because somewhere along the line
- 6:06there's a break in the cable, or it could be exported from your installation
- 6:12the other way, so it can go in multiple directions. There is easy
- 6:15ways of checking of this, and yes, the industry is in a journey
- 6:17of just trying to get a head around it, because again I wasn't taught
- 6:21this in college. Most of my peers weren't taught this. I've been on
- 6:25a journey now for probably about four years learning this because well, actually no
- 6:30longer than that. It's about six years now, sorry, And it is
- 6:34a bit of a mind melter, which is why on the podcast that I
- 6:39did on YouTube, I tried to visually show it for electricians. And it
- 6:43all goes back to the seventies when someone said, let's not put a three
- 6:46phase and neutral cable in. Let's just put a three phase and this concentric
- 6:49cable in which combines the earth and neutral. Wonderful for saving money. Not
- 6:55necessarily a good idea because forty years later, which is the life expectancy of
- 6:59that cable, but yeah, then the dn os are not rushing to replace
- 7:03the entire electricity network, especially the LV side, because it will cost hundreds
- 7:09of billions of pounds it was installed over the last hundred years. You think
- 7:13about it, the electricity network has never been on anyone's radar until now,
- 7:17and when it does get mentioned at a strategic funding level, it gets kicked
- 7:21into the next parliamentary funding cycle, so it never gets done. But we're
- 7:26at that point now where the statistics are showing there is a growing problem to
- 7:30the point where it's not a rare phenomenon. Electricians now need to be aware
- 7:33of it and it needs to become part of our toolbox of safety checks.
- 7:38So basically, the can has been kicked down the road as far as it
- 7:40can. It's sort of getting to the point now someone's going to start picking
- 7:42it up and it's now being thrown over the Elvy Electricians fence. In years
- 7:46there was a little dig there wasn't that. I'm happy to a certain opinion.
- 7:51What would you like to see the government do about this? Because ultimately
- 7:55this is going to boil down to sort of a government issue, isn't it.
- 7:58The size of it is going to be very Simply, I would love
- 8:03to see the electricity networks renationalized. I would like a very sensible discussion to
- 8:09be had because I know from freedom of information requests and engaging with networks that
- 8:15I believe uk PAN networks only monitor twelve percent of their LV network, which
- 8:20means they can put, let's say, out of a substation a thousand amp
- 8:22circuit, but only twelve percent of those thousand amp circuits are actually monitored,
- 8:26so they don't actually know what's coming back, which is quite scary. So
- 8:31if you have a let's say you've got a thousand amps going out and circuit
- 8:33into a street, in theory you get a thousand amps coming back potentially okay,
- 8:37But let's say you're monitoring a substation, you get three hundred amps back.
- 8:41We've lost seven hundred amps somewhere. It's diverting somewhere else. That's actually
- 8:46if you actually sit and think about that, that's it's going wherever it wants.
- 8:48That's how electricity works. We are masters of the PBC prisons, as
- 8:54most electricians call themselves if they're scientists. But yeah, it's a growing problem
- 8:58and it's not out scaremong grid you shoot. This is about raising the issue
- 9:01and educating electricians so that they are prepared to be able to confidently deal with
- 9:07it because in the next few years this is going to come up more and
- 9:09more and more. What are we doing to the network. We've spent over
- 9:13a decade decreasing the load with LED and all this energy efficiency to make lots
- 9:16of space for EV chargers, solar PV, and we know from a document
- 9:22called G five to five that the power quality of the networks is getting far.
- 9:26I'm going to use the word dirty because years ago the electricity network was
- 9:31linear, it was generated and transmitted. Now you've got a solar farm down
- 9:35the road from you pumping in all of this rectified staff which is trying to
- 9:39harmonize with the waveform of the network, while the wave form of the network's
- 9:43changing based on demand. So it's absolute carnage at the moment. Trying to
- 9:46synchronize all these remote generators, henceforth, smart meters is part of the solution.
- 9:52The Electrical Show on fixed radio. You're listening to the Electrical Show with
- 9:56Bosch Professional and Thomas Naji and we've got all mean and here and we're talking
- 10:01about diverted neutrals. Now, what could be a good sort of strategy for
- 10:05addressing this because it's it's actually it's a colossal issue which is not going to
- 10:11It's not going to go away. I think the phrase keep calm and carry
- 10:13on, it's the first thing I would say. I think there's a lot
- 10:18of people who've probably said secretly in their little groups or sensationalizing E five misdemean
- 10:24and Nope. I'm just trying to highlight an issue that has, as you're
- 10:28well aware, has affected me massively on my little slice of the world,
- 10:33and it's raised a bigger issue on railways. The railways do suffer from divert
- 10:35neutrals, but we get it even worse. We get bidirectional neutral currents,
- 10:39so we get traction power from the tracks which go into the DN O and
- 10:43we get the D and O power going into the tracks, so you get
- 10:46literally divert neutral from both directions. It's a mental phenomena. I've spent years
- 10:50and a lot of money researching it and trying to understand it to make sure
- 10:54my electricians are as safe as they can be. How about well detection of
- 11:01it. So like your average spark when he goes into a house or something,
- 11:05what's the easiest way that they can or what can they do to try
- 11:09to detect it? So the it you published a bit on the back of
- 11:13guidance Note three, which is a little section identifyed of neutrals, but put
- 11:18even simpler. Go out and buy yourself an earth leakage meter. It doesn't
- 11:20have to be expensive. You can get them for like between twenty and forty
- 11:24quid. I actually recommend three of them, and the reason I recommend three
- 11:28of them is so that you can greater understand the issue. So what I
- 11:31normally do is I've actually put it on my Instagram is a I took a
- 11:33picture at home. So if you put your clamp meat around your line and
- 11:37neutral your meter tails, you will then record your installation leakage. So that's
- 11:43the leakage that's coming from your installation, the imbalance between your life and neutral.
- 11:46So if you clap that around your tails, you know what losses you've
- 11:50got from inside your fixed wiring in your appliances. That's good to know because
- 11:54that then allows you to inform whether there's RCD issues, fault finding, etc.
- 11:58Again, get another one, put it on your earth in conductor,
- 12:01and that in theory should tell it should match what your installation leakage is.
- 12:05But most people when they do that, they find it's different. Well,
- 12:09that then leads you to inquire, well, what else is going on?
- 12:11So then you get another earth a leakage metup and you put it around the
- 12:16sheaf of the main cable and that will give you something called net current,
- 12:20and net current is basically power that should not be there. It's not in
- 12:24the internal cause, but it's flowing through the outer sheaf. If you've then
- 12:28got three different readings, you can then because I've got about eight clamp meters,
- 12:31I'll be honest with you, you can then literally start clamping onto different
- 12:35bonds and you can visually see where power where it's going he's going to.
- 12:39And I was on one job where we had a house and this is about
- 12:43six months ago, and we found that we had nine amps coming on the
- 12:48gas maine, literally nine amps on the gas mane that was coming through into
- 12:52So the installation was a three phase installation, was leaking about three hundred million
- 12:56amps, perfectly normal for what all the connected loads were. But the gas
- 13:00main was imported in nine amps, so we had like nine point three amps
- 13:03on the earth in conductor coming in through No just coming from the gas meter
- 13:07are into the main earth terminal and then off via the lead sheet of the
- 13:11cable. So by looking at the one around the main cable, you could
- 13:15see three hundred million amps nine amps nine point three. You can see where
- 13:18it's coming from. That's bizarre when you think actually and you multiply that issue
- 13:24by how many. The hard bit is is it fluctuates. It's not a
- 13:28constant science because your next door neighbor switching on the load can actually affect that
- 13:33reading. And this is one of the things I found when I went to
- 13:35see a guy in Bristol. We were actually measuring stuff and the loads were
- 13:39fluctuating. Because diverting neutral all depends on what the network conditions are, the
- 13:45state of the cabling, the loads on the cabling. It's not a perfect
- 13:48science. I'm actually trying to write a book on a guidance note at the
- 13:50moment on it under my electrical Safety around table guys, and I'm trying to
- 13:56I'm trying to Janet and John it so that people like me, the poor
- 14:00electrician of the world, can visually go I get that because some of the
- 14:03documents I've read on it, it's they're overly complicated and it don't get me
- 14:07wrongly is but identifying the fundamental problem shouldn't be just get a clamped meet up
- 14:13and if you're inquisitive enough, you're going to go something's wrong. I may
- 14:16not know, but you can then at least issue a danger of notification ring
- 14:20up one oh five, which is a D and O number, and then
- 14:22discharge your duty onto them to go out and fix it and do stuff.
- 14:26And I have seen some comedic responses to honess of you go on share one.
- 14:30Okay, So I was. There's a guy on Instagram called Pegasust electrical
- 14:33lovely man called Eddie Clements, wonderful human being. He does a lot for
- 14:37the industries. Great guy. And he was at a church doing a new
- 14:41boiler room. That's what he does, builds his own panels, does all
- 14:43boiler replacements. And he said to me, Paul, I've got a phonolic
- 14:46issue and I've got diverted neutrals. And this was on good Friday, so
- 14:50no one was working. So I went down to this church and I was
- 14:52like, great, I can see it. I did some testing and we
- 14:56wrung the dno. Dno. I hadn't got a clue. So they've got
- 14:58a digger out started digging a hole side the church, put four earth rods
- 15:01in strapped it to the cable, went near, go, we've lowered the
- 15:03impedance. That should be fine, and I was like, yeah, great,
- 15:07you've half the diverted neutral. Do you want to solve the problem?
- 15:09I ee, there's a neutral problem and they were like, uh, we
- 15:11don't really have no house. I'm not joking. I had to show them
- 15:15the diagrams that I'd written and used on podcasts. One bloke went, oh,
- 15:18I get that. And then I did wander lead testing and all I
- 15:20did was a connected onto the earth terminal, got one hundred meters wonder lead,
- 15:24and I went round to every fence panel and all the glighting columns,
- 15:26and I found at the furthest fence panel there was a huge jump in resistance.
- 15:30So I said, guys, let's look at this fence on the other
- 15:33side. There was all mud. We walked round and some local went,
- 15:37oh, you're back again, are you? And the guys went, what
- 15:39do you mean you were digging it up two days ago to put a new
- 15:43pass fly in. Long story short, they'd done an illegal joint for a
- 15:46drug farm across the road from the church. Yes, across the road from
- 15:50the church. I don't know if I should name the location, but it
- 15:52was an illegal drug farm, so they disconnected it and when they opened up
- 15:56the joint, they found the neutral was completely butchered and that was what I
- 15:58was causing it. So that was a really positive day and I learned loads,
- 16:03Eddy learned loads. The guys in the network learns. In fact,
- 16:04one their t was offered me a job and I was like, love to
- 16:07but paying the money, and networks aren't great payers. So the actually talking
- 16:11about networks, the age of the cabling in itself is going to become In
- 16:15fact, it is already an issue. I mean the actual age of it.
- 16:18I mean, how how is all of that going to be replaced?
- 16:22If you actually think of the when you think of the UK as a whole,
- 16:26I mean that's a phenomenal. I mean that's the size of that job.
- 16:30To do that, and you think the majority of it is what seventy
- 16:33seventy is very difficult when you've got privatization years ago, when the national grid
- 16:38started from like the thirties onward and they started doing bigger wiring. You have
- 16:42to look at our cabling now as basically approaching a century old. When did
- 16:45they privatize that. It's about nineteen thirty odd when the national grid was formed,
- 16:49because when electricity first got going in people's houses, it was around the
- 16:52eighteen eighties and they had that was when the first edition of the wine riggs
- 16:56came out. But you didn't have a D and O supply, you were
- 16:59a generator in the house, and it was only for rich people. It
- 17:02was only when they started to lay cabling for street lighting, which is where
- 17:06it first started. That was connected obviously to a generator or a substation.
- 17:10And then they went national in the thirties, so you could easily say that
- 17:12the cabling, I mean, I know the cabling to my house is well
- 17:15over seventy years old. It's an old lead pilk cable. Now what's happened,
- 17:19which, in the best intent to keep power on was a good thing
- 17:23but also a bad thing. In the seventies, they knew the networks were
- 17:26failing, so they introduced this CNE configured cable where the neutral and earth are
- 17:32combined, and that's your TNCs. So that's when TNCs started in the seventies.
- 17:37And TNC is the descriptive for before your installation, so combine neutral on
- 17:42earth before and then the S bit is when you go into the house,
- 17:45you separate the neutral on earth. Because you're not allowed neutral earth combined in
- 17:48a house. Why would you allow it in the street. Because they're supposed
- 17:52to be earthed at multiple occations, but they're not because sometimes people might lash
- 17:56stuff in in a substandard way. We have been the guardians of this because
- 18:02ironically, and if you don't mind me saying this, in amendment to of
- 18:06the Wine regulations, they introduced this X code. So for any electrician who
- 18:10looks at the intake, any issue you see, just put it as an
- 18:11X. It's not your problem. Don't fail the installation. So okay,
- 18:15So you're kind of saying that DNO equipment is exempt one one oh two.
- 18:18DNO equipment's exempt, and we've got to put an X code. So why
- 18:22are we doing Z testing? Why are we now checking for diverted neutral currents?
- 18:26It is an interesting quandary, isn't it, Because we're the guardians for
- 18:30this stuff, and what I'm finding is like bonding conductors. The bonding conductor
- 18:36sizing used to be in the Electricity Supply regulations, and then when ESQCR came
- 18:41out and it all got rewritten, somebody threw it into the wine rix Committee
- 18:44and the winer Ings Committee said yet we'll have it, so it went into
- 18:47the wine rings. But it didn't used to be. It used to be
- 18:48in the network conditions. I mean in London. Bit a top tip for
- 18:52you years ago, the old London Electricity Board PME guide, which is the
- 18:56descriptive for CNY too many terms. It used to require a minimum of a
- 19:02sixteen meal earth bond. Why because if you had a failed neutral it was
- 19:08sized adequately to take the neutral conductor current. But we seem to lose all
- 19:14that. Not I've got copies if anyone wants some. INMPDIAF. I've got
- 19:15all the old DNO stand and it's just a found set of knowledge. Do
- 19:18I do have all of the DNO standards, And yes, they probably hate
- 19:22me for it, but I'm just trying to be a decent human being and
- 19:26a good engineer in raising this. I don't profit from any of this,
- 19:29and yes I get a lot of flak for it, but I'm just asking
- 19:32questions as you also love the flack as well. Don't deny it. No,
- 19:36I hate it. I hate it. I absolutely hate it. But
- 19:38let's come back to wrap this chat up after more music here on Fixed Radio,
- 19:41the Builder station Fix Radio. This is the Electrical show. I'm Thomas
- 19:47Naji with Paul Mehanan here and we've been discussing. Do I mean say,
- 19:49we've been discussing. I started it, He finished it, infa, I
- 19:52started it. He did the mid section of the end section. Sorry.
- 19:56Yeah, all I did was describe my terminology of how I think it is.
- 20:00We actually think million miles off the mark? Just six out of ten,
- 20:06six out of ten. I've never liked you anyway. Question is there
- 20:10a disconnect between the capacity? Six out of ten? Serious? Yeah?
- 20:15Come on, all right? Seven generally right, that's the Is there a
- 20:19disconnect between the Why seven? I was going on because I said that basically,
- 20:26then the principle of TNCs. We'll get back to the show in a
- 20:30minute. The principle of TNCs is that you have a cable coming in and
- 20:33that there were strategic earth points all the way about to transform. That is
- 20:36fundamentally correct. Allegedly. Yeah, but that if you if you look in
- 20:41the book, that is strategic. That is how correct. It may not
- 20:45be like that in reality. I used to work for a diner. Remember
- 20:48they didn't bother in a lot of cases they just didn't or the fundamental principle
- 20:52is yesterday. Yeah, that's why you got That's why I'm giving you a
- 20:55seven. Now, just you're arguing, can we get back to the point.
- 20:59Sorry, everybody the capacity of houses and the network they're connected to.
- 21:03So there's going to be another issue there because I mean, homes are flying
- 21:07a homes are flying up at a rate of knots. I mean, cookie
- 21:11cutter houses are just I call them cookie cutter houses. I mean they're absolutely
- 21:14everywhere. Now you see a piece of green belt land that I could never
- 21:17build on that suddenly there's a thousand homes on it. So it's what's your
- 21:22I guess observations in regard to that, because all these things are amplifying it,
- 21:26and all new homes now need an EV charger, so you've got I
- 21:29don't know, it just seems well, no, they're dealing with that.
- 21:32So it's really simple if you connect into the HV network, which is heavily
- 21:34invested in. Because the HV network, your failure that impacts hundreds of thousands
- 21:40of not millions of people. So when you're building new estates, there's always
- 21:42a requirement to put a new substation in brand new h tree feeds, and
- 21:47then obviously the developer has to put brand new feeds into the houses and comply
- 21:51apart s put EV charges in. So on new developments, it's all built
- 21:53in and it's connected network. The challenge is in the existing houses. I
- 21:57mean, I'm lucky I've got undred out supply to my house, but I
- 22:02know from recent link box fires in the street that anywhere within like five or
- 22:07six streets of my house, they're refusing any more fuse upgrades at all.
- 22:11Even PV connections are now being heavily questioned because if you think about one hundred
- 22:17amp supplying to the house and you're potentially generating another thirty or forty amps,
- 22:21there's a lot that cable industry is only rated for so much. And this
- 22:23is the whole we discussed in our presumer debate, where if you've got battery
- 22:29storage and generation in every house and that old cable, something's going to give.
- 22:33And that's why smart meters are actually key to monitoring and switching stuff out
- 22:37to prevent that main cable from tripping. But new builds is never a problem
- 22:41existing it's an aged infrastructure. Ironically, when I was in Germany. I
- 22:45was speaking to electricians there, as you do, and the guy was telling
- 22:48me that they only allow thirty five amps supply to a house. I was
- 22:52like, how do you do that? And he just went, well,
- 22:55selectivity, we just have masses. Their intakes are ridiculous, about seven or
- 23:00eight different boards of monitoring and metering and load demand switching and all sorts.
- 23:04And I was just like that, thirty five am five am to a house.
- 23:07I did a power quality assessment on my house and the average load is
- 23:11four point six amps. But how does that work? Then? If they
- 23:15we're not using that much energy anymore? You think about it everything now,
- 23:18my lighting circuit sixty watts. I mean that's true. Yeah, I get
- 23:23that bit. But what if you've got an electric shower or something. Yeah,
- 23:26but you'll only be using that for so much time. You're not gonna
- 23:29running the electric cooker and the electric shower and charging your car because then you
- 23:32can get load catailment and all that jazz. The Germans evidently got it now,
- 23:36because I was absolutely blown away with the stuff this guy was telling me.
- 23:41Yeah, but yeah, all right, what can sparks do to stay
- 23:45vigilant with this? Because it's something that they're going to need to be vigilant.
- 23:48More and more about clamp meter. Get yourself one. Doesn't have to
- 23:52be expensive, doesn't have to be a major brand. Just get yourself a
- 23:55clamp meter and make sure your safe things will work include it. I have
- 23:59a rule on my railway where the guys must wear class two insulated gauntlets and
- 24:04class two rubber matting in the switch rooms. Nobody is allowed into them and
- 24:08no disconnections during the day of any Earth in cables. That's what I do
- 24:12on the railways. In domestic homes, let's be perfect, Frank. We've
- 24:17all done boards where we've gone into the board and it has been on.
- 24:19It's not lie about it. We have worked live. When you're doing live
- 24:23testing, you do work live. And occasionally I have disconnected a wire from
- 24:29an earth terminal and I've seen a little spark. I've done them under control
- 24:32conditions where you know, I've been standing on a mat or something like that
- 24:36using insulated tools, and you will see arcs and sparks. And if you're
- 24:38seeing that, then check to see if there's a current or volts there.
- 24:41Just to be clear that most of this diverted neutral stuff doesn't have voltage behind
- 24:45it. It's just purely energy, very very minor voltage. If there was
- 24:51a fault on the network, that's when the voltage rises. Okay, disconnected
- 24:55neutral in total is when the voltage could go up to two thirty four hundred
- 24:59volts. I have always called diverting neutral current as a precursor to a fully
- 25:03broken neutral But what about things I foundation earthing? Can that cover it up?
- 25:08It masks And that's what the DNO do a lot. They go out
- 25:11put loads of electrodes in around the cable to try and reduce the impedance,
- 25:15to give somewhere for that neutral nerth to dissipate. But it's not great.
- 25:18When you read all the guidance about where people are teteeing supplies and putting in
- 25:22electrodes, you can actually introduce energy through your electrode into the installation. So
- 25:29it's I have a furious anger with the current recommendation for an additional electrode one
- 25:36because I know it's probably going to be the way we go in the future.
- 25:41But also I feel like the DNO are throwing their mess over our fence
- 25:45and we shouldn't be paying for it, And as taxpayers. How many times
- 25:48do we have to pay for errors or problems in society? It's a fair
- 25:53point. The electrical show on fixed radio that ladies and gentlemen? Is it?
- 25:59For today's electrical show with Bosh Professional Now on on our crips sheet here
- 26:03Mark because he does a little sort of sort of sketch of things we can
- 26:07talk about and discuss some pointers and he always puts AOB. Now AOB is
- 26:11traditionally any other business, but it's weird because every time I look at it,
- 26:15it also stands for area of outstanding beauty. If you look on a
- 26:18map, and every time I look at it, I think area of us
- 26:22stand beauty. What are you on about, oh, any other business?
- 26:25Yeah, yeah, I don't know if I can exceed your expectations for area
- 26:29of outstanding beauty. But just a couple of stats. So for everyone listening
- 26:33about diverting neutral current again, there's no need to panic. There is more
- 26:36guidance that will be published in due time. There are various parties in the
- 26:41industry who are doing their best to do training at live events, like the
- 26:45CEF Live team and various nap it team. There's lots of people now talking
- 26:48about this, so it's only a good thing. Just wanted to leave you
- 26:51with a stat So following a what's the website called I will remember it?
- 26:59If you basically to type in my name and freedom of information request, you
- 27:02can see all the fwis I've done for yourself. But in two thousand and
- 27:06three, there were fifty seven broken pens in the network. So the network
- 27:10you're looking at, what thirty odd years old, so still with in its
- 27:12life fifty seven. Okay, fast forward to twenty twenty one. So in
- 27:18additional twenty years to pass the forty year life, four hundred and seventy four
- 27:22broken pens resulting in injury. So that's more than one a day. And
- 27:27now that's basically around roughly eight times an increase. So if you take that
- 27:33eight time increase over eighteen years, it leads to, let's say, in
- 27:38another eighteen years, it will lead to sixty eight thousand, two hundred and
- 27:45fifty six broken pens in eighteen years time. Wow, if that trend keeps
- 27:51continuing. Now I'm not saying it will, but let's just talk of an
- 27:56opinion piece, a bit of common sense. It won't get to that.
- 28:00You just need to start looking for it and reporting it and stay safe.
- 28:03And that's my bit for the end. Oh and sorry. John Ward has
- 28:07done an excellent video on YouTube. He's doing a series one where he introduces
- 28:12the subject in his unique way and he's built his own rig apply wood at
- 28:17home and it's a phenomenal piece of educational content. There's more to come,
- 28:21so please go and watch that on YouTube. John Ward, thank you listen.
- 28:25All of the previous shows are available by searching the Electrical Show wherever you
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