A neighbour asked me to look at his fuse box: It had three fuses, one for the sockets, one for lights and one for a shower. The socket fuse had actually caught fire to the ancient fuse box. The wiring was all so ancient and burnt it was really quite frightening. I said that the whole house needed re-wiring very urgently, to keep him going in the meantime I put in a new fuse box with mcbs and he promised to get quotes for a rewire, three years on it still hasn't happened, I could not do more than tell him that the wiring was so old it could cause a fire, I actually wish that I had made him call in a paid professional in the first place, they would have condemned it all.
May have been the theory, but never once known it done. A sparks installing a new CU or whatever may want the main fuse in and out more than once. Like say to avoid leaving the property with no electricity over night or whatever.
Well, it's not uncommon for seals not to be replaced. They didn't bother when fitting a new meter here.
How often do you change your CU? No need to isolate if simply adding a new circuit - it has an isolator switch built in. So the only real need is when changing it. Say every 30 years plus. ;-)
Depends where you live , they can be 3 4 or 5 core depending when they were laid and local regulations / best practice at the time .
Neutral and earth are the same thing , the neutral is bonded to the earth again depending on local practices this may be back at the substation or to he Armour shielding
Practices have changed dramatically over the years
In some parts of the midlands 5 core was used at one point so you had both a neutral and earth core plus amour
I remember the problems with early laptop computers ~25 years ago, the batteries never lasted long because they could not cope with constant top-up charging. Today's batteries are much better of course but at root is the desired usage, always recharge at every opportunity because you never know when you might need to use all the capacity
Only if the bus route goes where you need to go at the time you need to go.
An example would be my journey to/from work around 5 years ago, which was around 10 miles to an office on the outskirts of a neighbouring town. This was a 15-25 minute drive each way depending on time of day and other traffic. I did use the train (the most sensible public transport option) a few times but this added at least 30-40 minutes of walking time to the journey in each direction. There was also a bus option but that was even slower.
What I am thinking of is an optimised driverless electric taxi service:
- door to door
- discount for pre-booking (allows vehicle charging to be scheduled for maximum availaility)
- further discount if you're flexible about timing and/or accept journey share for all/part of the journey
- lack of parking spaces at the other end wouldn't be an issue because the 'taxi' would go off and do other work or get itself recharged.
Bear in mind that air quality and congestion issues could mean that *no* private cars are allowed in urban areas in the future. There has to be an alternative.
It's more likely to have been a problem with poor chargers. Ni-Cads didn't really have a sorter service life than modern types if used within their limits and not overcharged. But plenty early chargers cooked them.
There's more chance of that than having enough hire vehicles to cover all demand.
You do realise to give the same flexibility as your own car, there'd need to be just about as many of these vehicles? And of course a nice fat profit for those administering them?
Pray tell how an 'optimised electric taxi' is going to be any different to the same vehicle in private ownership? Snag with taxis is they are only efficient when running with passengers. Which simply isn't possible all of the time. Unless you're willing to wait until one has dropped off a fare close to you - and can do the same at the other end.
No system ever is going to replace the convenience of your own private car.
A taxi system suffers from exactly the same problem as any public transport - it has to cope with a peak demand at rush hour so is under used at other times.
Plus of course it will add to congestion as the vehicles will no longer be making a journey from a to b they will have c included in it to ad be fighting through the traffic to get to d e f etc instead of being parked up
- and yet, even when I am driving in urban areas during peak hours there are still plenty of vehicles sitting parked up in residential streets. Unused. And very often you will see that most of the cars out on the road have far more seats than occupants ...
See
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for further insights. I believe Uber are also modelling future driverless taxi systems. Also, the current Uber model doesn't allow pre-booking more than a few minutes in advance which, with a discount for accepting a bit of flexibility in time of travel should allow additional opportunities to make journey sharing work, which in turn reduces the number of vehicles required to run the service.
- and yet we're all happy to buy our own vehicle which then spends 90%+ of its life parked. Unused. How efficient is that?
You're still thinking in terms of conventional taxi services where a large part of the economics and logistics of the service revolve around the drivers, who take up space in the vehicles that could otherwise be used for revenue paying passengers. I was quite specific that the service I was proposing was driverless.
No, but you can get pretty close now with hand-driven taxis if you (or your employer) are prepared to pay. I've done it, because my current job requires me to be away from home for long periods and entirely dependent on taxis for point to point transport. In some ways this is actually more convenient than having my own car because I don't have to worry about parking it.
But is the problem with the supply of vehicles or drivers? We already accept personal car ownership largely for commuting with a typical utlisation of <
3%; that's the 10% of the time the car spends on the road multiplied by the fact that typically only one of 4-5 seats is occupied.
Computer control could help reduce those wasted journeys when the taxi runs empty by only using one which has dropped off close to you. And perhaps some form of sharing. But both of those mean longer waits for it to arrive and longer journey times.
If you have to wait for a taxi, you might as well walk to the bus stop.
I well remember shared taxis - actually hire cars - when I worked the odd late night in central London in TV. Even with light night time traffic my journey time was inevitably longer than the PT one. The reason for the cab was PT had stopped. ;-)
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