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I find older systems tend to test out better than many newer ones, except when bob the builder has been changing things. I have a theory that any electrical faults have been arcing so long they have welded themselves together :ROFLMAO:

4mm is the norm in domestic installations, 6mm is what they tend to use on solar farms which are usually wored in banks of 20 panels, but obviously the cable runs are much longer than domestic.

True story time. Had a customer contact me about rewiring her smallish 3 bed semi. 2 other companies had told her she needed a full rewire costing either £12k or £14k , and this was around 8 years ago. I asked if they had done a full inspection, they hadn't. So I said we would do that and see if...

There is life without apps 😀

https://electrical.theiet.org/wiring-matters/years/2021/84-march-2021/estimating-the-age-of-an-electrical-installation/

all you need is a single phase meter like the one below. Wire it into the office supply cable. https://owen-brothers.com/singlephase/eca2-single-phase-kwh-electric-meter-100-amp-mid-certified.html

it's not the age of the cable. it's the condition that matters, Cable used at full load 24/7/365 can be worn out in as little as 5 years, cable hardly used can last an awful lot longer. UK cable went metric circa 1970, that doesn't mean every house was wired in metric from 1970 onwards as no...

one possibility is to set the batteries to UPS rather than 'self use'

never has any problems with crompton, bar their LED tubes don't seem to last 30,000 hours.

yes, but it's sometimes lost in poor Chinese to English translation.

crompton lamps are usually decent. But different makes of dimmers and lamps aren't always compatible.

strictly speaking you shouldn't touch it, however, its not like they want the things back...

it's really an issue for the DNOs, if you are installing 16A limited systems, and it back feeds more than 30% of the local transformers capability, then it's the DNOs responsibility to do domething about it. Quite often they reset the transformer taps to a lower voltage. Sometimes they try to...

That can happen where you have a social housing estate and every house has an array. But generally doesn't. I've never understood how inverters seem to differentiate between grid voltage and backfeed from other inverters. I'm my own experience though, if the inverters are tripping out due to...

Plymouth city centre is up around 250V, although that might have changed since they built some large blocks of flats and replaced a lot of cabling

Not down here there isn't. Solar inverters show grid voltages, and Ive fitted hundreds of those, in between regular electrical works. My own house today is in the photo below. Might be different on new build estates, but I don't get involved with those.

I suppose those writing the regs assume worst case scenario that grid voltage is only 230V, as if! I don't think I've seen lower than 245V in 20 years as the DNOs are keeping voltages up to cope with higher demands on out of date cable infrastructure. Ergo, even if the VD exceeds what it should...

Customer was very happy not to spend the money😀. Half way along the run he had his own water supply and pump house, so had filter pumps running a lot of the time which would absorb a fair portion of the energy generated. Plus it was a split array, so whilst I calculated for max 4kw, it would not...

You forgot one, solar 1%, volt drop. I never understood why lights should be different to power, but I would assume all this is about energy efficiency reducing demand for power generation or prevention of cables overheating. I did once calculate the cable heating effect in a long sub main to a...

Sounds like a reasonable plan to me.