Alan,

On Tue, 23 Jan 2007 09:34:28 -0800 (PST), alan smith wrote:

> wow....one circuit feeding all the lights for a floor?

In my house it's all the lights on both floors!
    
>   I built and wired my house, and have a 200A service, that feeds a 40 breaker panel and I have only 3 spares.  Stove,dryer (electric) are on 
seperate feeds.  Washing machine has to be on a 20A dedicated circuit as well.  I put my furnance on a seperate circuit.  Then split out for bedrooms, 
and others all on seperate circuits....and yes, thats alot of wire to home run back to the panel BUT then rooms are isolated.  Certain rooms do not 
need alot of power, like bedrooms.  My office is on its own.  So is my workroom.  Kitchen has three feeds...two for outlets, the other for dishwasher 
and disposal.  Outside lighting on its own.  Bathrooms GFI are daisychained, but each bathroom has its own GFI, just all on its own dedicated circuit.  

Good grief, I've never even seen a 40-breaker panel in a factory, let alone a house!  :-)  I have a small 3-bedroom house and when I moved in it had 4 
fuses - 5A for lights, 2 x 30A for sockets upstairs and down, 1 x 16A for the immersion heater.  Not unusual for a house built in 1937... I have since 
replaced it with a 12-place Consumer Unit with Miniature Circuit Breakers (MCBs) and split up the circuits somewhat - the fridge/freezer on its own 
circuit so it doesn't get taken out by something else causing a trip (bound to happen at the start of a period when I'm away from home, per Murphy), I 
have split the lighting and provided a shed supply.  But I still have a few spare ways in the box!
    
>   Basically, when a builder does a house, and hires an electrician to wire it...they do it as cheap and easy as they can, in order to make a better 
profit. When you do it yourself, you can afford to make it just the way you want...nothing overloaded, circuits isolated, and never worry about how 
you wish it was done because you did it (blame yourself?).  Unlike internet, where you can always use wireless....cant do that with power.  And yes, I 
did run CAT5E to every room except the bathrooms.....(hmmm....emebedded controller for a toilet to monitor water useage, flushing...naaaaaaaa).  And 
in general, the material is cheap when you buy in bulk, its the labor that usually drives the price up.

I agree completely, and they tend to have preconceived ideas of requirements, even if *you* know what you want.  I know my sister had virtually a 
stand-up fight with the electrician who was rewiring her kitchen, because she wanted about three times as many sockets as he thought she should 
need!

If I built my own house (always a plan, but sadly unlikely to happen now) I would design the circuits for the best arrangement I could, including 
having some circuits UPS-protected, and with provision for solar and perhaps wind-power (I'm dead jealous of James' solar roof! :-) and maybe some 
low-voltage DC circuits, but making radical changes to an existing house is very hard work - most of the cable drops to switches in my house are in 
well-buried narrow conduit with loose single wires - the conduits are too narrow to take modern twin-&-earth cable, and in some cases they are run 
in the middle of a brick wall!  Chasing new cable runs would be a major undertaking, with redecorating needed in most rooms afterwards.
 
Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist