P.P.P.P.P.P.

A friend of mine once quoted the six P's of any Project "Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance". Well I have been planning this enterprise for about six years so we shall see how this cliché stands up.

A lot of the planing recently has been around the electrics. What is the best way to install the electrics in my chalet? Well the French electric book is a gold mine of information, extremely useful and not as difficult to read/translate as I imagined it might be. After all, the subject matter is fairly narrow and it doesn't take much to figure out if the book is saying do this or don't do this.
Hmmmm. Sounds like famous last words!.

The consumer unit is the box that houses all the trips and RCD's and what not that distribute the electricity around the house. What used to be fuse boxes and now is Micro Circuit Breakers (MCB) or Residual Current Detectors (RCD). This is basically a largish box on the wall with three, maybe four rows of trip switches in it. Each row starts with a big switch called the Interrupteur differential which is and RCD on the the earth and trips the power to that row if it detects any current flow in the earth for that row. (I think ?) The row contains several smaller trip switches or MCB called disjocteur divisionnaire These are rated in Amps and will trip if the current in that circuit exceeds the rated amount.

So as I understand it you are protected from overloading by the disjocteur divisionnaire and from electrocution by the Interrupteur differential.

So what I have to do now is figure out what stuff I need/want in the chalet that will use electricity and where it will be and then figure out how to get the wire to it, then figure out which trip the wire should be attached to and ....and...

Planning the plug sockets is pretty easy, there is a minimum requirement for each room and you are allowed 5 sockets (or equivalent, double sockets apparently count as one, but triple sockets count as two) on 1.5mm cable spur and 8 sockets on a 2.5mm cable spur. Each of these spurs needs a trip on the consumer unit. I worked out that I wanted about 54 sockets through out the chalet which is just a bit more than the minimum allowed. That's a minimum of 7 trips but more like 10 trips just for the normal sockets. Then there are the dedicated sockets/power outlets for the main appliances in the chalet, Oven, hob, freezer, washing machine, dryer, dishwasher and seemingly any other major appliance. I think I will put an extra one in for the microwave as well. Each of these needs its own trip, that is another seven.

The lights are harder to plan the routes for, as you need to figure in the switches as well. A minimum of 19 lamps that I will increase to 26. A lighting circuit can have up to 8 lamps on it and uses 1.5mm cable. So that is at least another 4 trips.
That is about 21 trips and still we have the heating and hot water to add in!

But the hardest part of all this is deciding where the actual wires should run, where to put the gaine! Some of these problems will be solved by using false walls or wooded panelling over the concrete walls and using the space between to run the cables, but this cant solve everything. At some stage I need to mark out boxes and cable runs on the concrete and cut it out. It will be easier to cut these chases down from switch to floor but most of the time it is going to be up from switch to ceiling. Sounds fun. And the light itself, how do make a hole big enough in the ceiling, do it from above which is certainly easier but needs to make a big hole all the way through. Or from below which will be harder work just holding the drill up let alone applying pressure to the bit. I suppose its a case of suck it and see try both and see which is more effective.

I should be going back out there soon, so I will have to decide what I am going to do. Drill some holes in the concrete I think!