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Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ.

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All you kids......

Posted by unclestu on July 20, 2014 at 16:08:34:
I can remember pre NEC days....

One home I lived in used cartridge fuses and had three of them for the entire two bedroom house. One Fuse for the kitchen, one for the lights, and one for all the outlets.

Another I lived in had those glass type screw in fuses: a lot safer to change than those cartridge type.

NEC codes were developed for the lowest common denominator types: people who were too cheap or too stupid to install enough current distribution means for the electrical usage. Of course when those houses were built people had far fewer appliances, but still.

Consider even modern homes which meet code. It is not uncommon to have several (say three for the sake of convenience) duplex outlets in series in one room attached to one breaker. The breaker is standardized at 15 amps, and so are the duplex outlets. Suppose you plugged in a 15 amp draw device in each duplex and turned them all on: That's 45 amps on one 15 amp breaker...So much for the common sense of the NEC rules...

The rules are there to promote some degree of common sense and some standardization. But to prohibit use of a 32 amp breaker is just plain silly as long as the cable gauge is sufficient to carry the full current. After all, we have 50 amp breakers (they are 240 volt so can run the same wire gauge).

Even for purely safety reasons, should the wire gauge be appropriate for the increase breaker size, there really is nothing wrong with doing so. Yeah you break the law, but how many of you follow speed limits dogmatically ?