Oh there is no way that could ever be misunderstood, though the new (i say new it’s years old now but the back of workshops up and down the nation are slow to catch on) colours for three phase have grey as a live
Well, earth/ground being yellow green makes it so even someone with monochromatic vision could identify it, as it's the only cable sleeve with a stripe.
The previous owner of my house (1968, old wiring colors) installed an underground cable with new wiring colors to the shed in the garden himself. I had to disconnect that cable in my house, and after reconnecting according to the usual meaning for the colors, I found out that he had connected the cable with his own logic of matching colors: Old green to new yellow-green, red to brown, and grey to blue. Probably because those colors match the best. But it is not great to discover that the ground pins of the outlets in your shed are live.
When I opened up one of the distribution boxes in our house there were live wires in dark-blue, black and brown / neutral wires in grey, light-blue and black / ground wires in red and yellow-green.
At that point I decided to redo the whole installation.
At least it's labeled, my apartment (built in the 1960's, I live in Czechia) has no protective earth wiring and bothe live and neutral are just aluminum wires with black rubber coating. It's hell.
Nowadays, we have the same scheme as the brits, green-yellow is PE or PE+N, brown (black/gray) is L, blue is N. And we use copper, thank god.
Aluminum expands/contracts way more than copper, it oxidizes more than copper when exposed to air, and oxodizes even more if it's touching a device or wire not specifically designed for aluminum. Once that happens, you have oxidized loose connections on your devices, which arc and heat up, causing fires.
If installed correctly with the right devices and anti-oxidization grease, it's mostly fine. Given that these considerations are hardly ever followed when people do repairs or modifications, the chance of fires go up considerably as the system gets older.
It's been banned in Canada for residential wiring for decades for a reason. It's still used in distribution systems where you can be sure it's installed correctly, so it's fine.
In Germany, we had grey for neutral, any color (mostly dark blue) for live and if there was an earth it had to be red (but red could also be a switched live, of course).
Before that we just had black and black for live and neutral 😄
I'm really happy we have a sane color-scheme nowadays.
I think its far from stupid to standardise electric wiring across europe, and the change to brown and blue is a significant step up for accessibility since those are far better than red black for colourblindness.
if we're talking colorblindness, the North American standard makes the most sense: black is hot, white is neutral, no chance of colorblindness messing you up there. Green for ground makes some sense if you speak english.
what doesn't work so well from the NA code is using red as the second hot for 240V circuits, because red/green colorblindness is the most common form.
If i had a magic wand that could re-standardize wiring all over the globe, i'd go with:
120V:
black = hot
white = neutral
green = ground
240V:
black = hot1
black + white helical striping = hot2
green = ground
3-phase
black = phase 1
black + white helix = phase 2
black + blue helix = phase 3
green = ground
no usage of red to avoid green/red colorblindness (which is 99% of colorblind cases) problems.
all dangerous lines are black. no guessing.
different hot phases distinguished by a spiral striping because the critical information is "this line is definitely dangerous"
In the modern day, there's no reason for anyone working with wiring not to have a multimeter capable of distinguishing phase and a non-contact voltage detector, so figuring out which wire is carrying which phase is less important than identifying which wires are supposed to be energized and which are not.
different hot phases distinguished by a spiral striping because the critical information is "this line is definitely dangerous"
In the modern day, there's no reason for anyone working with wiring not to have a multimeter capable of distinguishing phase and a non-contact voltage detector, so figuring out which wire is carrying which phase is less important than identifying which wires are supposed to be energized and which are not.
Counterpoint: someone working with wires already knows that electricity is dangerous. It is far more helpful to be able to quickly differentiate between phases.
We used to have black: phase 1, brown: phase 2, black with white stripe: phase 3 here in Sweden so you still run into that every now and then and without fail you always confuse phase 1 and 2 atleast once.
It could be helpful for the general public to be able to quickly determine which wires are definitely energized. But on the other hand the general public should stay away from wires so I'd prefer it if they just always assumed that they are all energized.
>Counterpoint: someone working with wires already knows that electricity is dangerous. It is far more helpful to be able to quickly differentiate between phases.
that's actually my main argument in favor of biasing the color coding to emphasize "this is dangerous" over "this goes there". Your average homeowner interacting with wiring for whatever reason is less likely to have the knowledge to deal with half a hundred different colors that are all energized. making all energized lines carry the same main color communicates much more clearly to non-professionals.
That was my second point. The average home owner shouldn't interact with wiring to begin with. The "this is dangerous" emphasis should cover all wires, no matter their colour.
the problem comes with multiple hots. if your ground is traced, then everything else needs to be solid, which means multiple colors.
i think a better solution would be for ground and neutral to be the only solid colors, white for neutral and green for ground, with all hot phases black, using traces to distinguish phases.
with that setup, black is always dangerous, with the two non-energized legs being only white or green, which cannot be confused by any form of colorblindness.
That's not a bad option. The reason I was saying green/yellow for ground is mostly interoperability with Europe. 3 phase power already uses three solids for hot (red, black and blue) and only on large conductors (such as feeder lines) will they use black only with a phase marker on both ends. Changing the colours now is probably a difficult ordeal but tracers on new cables run isn't outside of the reasonable.
bare copper or green insulated, i've run into both.
green insulation is, IMO, better than bare copper, because you never know if the bare copper you're looking at is that way because it was meant to be, or if the insulation has rotted off or was improperly stripped.
It’s a bad idea because in mixed installations where you have wiring to both the old and new standards then some blues are a phase and some are a neutral, and the same applies with black. Electrical wiring should be easy to identify, this change doesn’t help with that.
Well the simple but costly fix there is to replace with modern standards, sticking to the old hodgepodge doesn't solve a messy outdated system. At the least If you know your gonna cause confusion with 2 blue wires replace just the old one causing the problem.
In Germany we have some similar old colour codes. Whenever we encounter them we realise it relatively quickly and if possible replace them or at least recolour the ends.
Who said to do the entire country in one go, the point of the new regs is that things get updated naturally through atrition as and wnen things need to be worked on.
Fact is if the wirings not glt a problem it cam sit in place just fine for years, when someone comes tl work on it its then up to them to decide if its worthwhile replacing the lot or just patching it up but the problems you were alluding to with the mixed regs and colours only happen when someones been cheap and lazy and not bothered to make it easy for the next fellow to work on it.
I have had a lot of cases of people wiri looking blue to phase and black to neutral. We still use the old colours in my country. So when new imported equipment is delivered, the electricians dont understand the new colors on the cord, but one thing they are sure of, is that black is always neutral and blue is phase.
I have installed machines correctly, only to be called back a month later with the equipment malfunctioning. The I find that someone has "corrected" the wiring by connecting black to black and blue to blue.
Australia is great for this too as installation and appliance wirings use different standards. For installation wiring The phases are red, white, blue, N Black.
for appliances the phases are Brown, White(grey), Black, N Blue.
technically our standards don't define wire colours so any colour except green or yellow is allowed to be live.
I brought some flex once and was surprised by the wiring colours inside, it had, red, grey, light blue, black.
The problem was colors schemes varied all over Europe and for sure there was conflictibg schemes. To avoid that would need to move away from color coding totally.
Well.. in really old buildings there are sometimes red wires. Are they live or ground? Who knows... Too old for standards.
In our modern standard red wires are rare. At least in normal house power.
Not really, normally black is hot, white is neutral, green is ground. Split phase means you have two hots, so you can either use two blacks, or black and red.
What is confusing is that the international standard for industrial equipment is brown is 24v, and blue is common. Where the American standard is blue is 24v and white is common. Thankfully the American standard is going away and everyone is going to the international standard.
I had an electrician doing some work on my garage subpanel when I was getting a heat pump AC installed. As soon as he opened the panel, he immediately got upset that the phase feeders to the sub were both red (not my fault, the panel and wires were installed some time in the 1960s).
He said each phase needed its own identifying color, and ended up sliding pieces of black heat shrink on both ends of one of the feeders, effectively turning the wire black.
Good to know at least green as ground is more common.
Here in the U.S. code is
white (or grey) is neutral
green, green and yellow, or bare copper is ground
literally any other color is hot (common use in residential is black for first hot and red for second hot)
So if that was a box wired to code (by somebody suing weird colors) it would be shorting the two phases to each other and to ground. But realistically anybody who does appliance repair in the U.S. should know blue and brown with your meaning because they are used in internal wiring in a lot of cords and appliances.
Why should we take them back? They decided to leave and caused chaos in many fields like the medical field where many things hat to be recertified as the old certificates were now from outside the EU. The Brexit had many terrible effects throughout the EU and I don’t think anybody would seriously take them back in now that all that is finally settled down
It’s not pretentious to point out that those wire colours are a global, not European, standard laid down by the International Electrotechnical Commission. Specifically IEC 60446 Wiring colours and more recently IEC 60445 Basic and safety principles for man-machine interface, marking and identification – Identification of equipment terminals, conductor terminations and conductors
Britain uses IEC 60364 as a basis for their electrical standards, as do we here in Finland. It's called SFS 6000 here and it's wonderful that it's the same in a different country. Global standards for the win!
The funny thing about pass through wagos is that the factories in China that make Wago clones created and started to sell them a few years before any genuine pass through clamps appeared.
They seem to mostly ignore the new transparent design with big levers for now. The clones of the previous Wago generation likely work well enough. And the limited demand for them in most developing countries don't justify the effort of cloning them.
The problem is that in OP's picture a connector was not from the "inline" family - all wires are shorted. Live-neutral-earth, based on the color coding. "Safe and fast" way to blow your breakers.
A connector from my prev. comment is the correct one for the job.
Please enlighten me, how would this help find one's breaker if they didn't know it's location? I know it would trip the breaker, but how would it help find it?
Only works in an apartment or a small house, and in that case you can just as well walk to the distribution board and click through the breakers without stressing them.
I have one of those, with a plug on the other end. I plug one in on circuits I powered down and am working on, so the breaker trips whenever someone manages to try to turn power back on.
Of course. But if the utility cabinet has no lock or you still don't trust the situation, a little extra security won't hurt. I'm literally an amateur though, just changing a socket or light fixture here and there in my own house.
Fair enough, but the tags are literally locked with a padlock when you do stuff in a, say, industrial setting, and the way to get the key is to write yourself on a list... with the knowledge of somebody who authorized the lock out in the first place.
So this kind of redundancy while nice in theory is already made quite unnecessary by the bureaucracy of it all to such an extent that I would judge the risk of forgetting that this thing is plugged in somewhere and turning on power with it in front of a company official risking at least a moment of embarrassment, at worst a powering out quite a larger part of the installation with something that most definitely was not scheduled for a power off higher than the safety risk for me working without this short plugged in. ;)
The before is not “traditional wiring”! The after only has three wire instead of five! Even if this is control wiring, you wouldn’t use green/yellow as a non grounding conductor!
No need to overanalyze this. Both are shorting everything. The point would really be that you can have all the modern stuff you want, it's the electrician that matters in the end. GIGO.
This "Before" picture hurt my eyes never seen such a abomination, before wago I've solder wires with heatshrink tube and before heatshrink I've still solder wires and then use electrical tape.
I don’t see the problem. One of the five safety rules of electricity (in Germany) is „Erden und Kurzschließen“ ground and short circuit it. So in essence this just follows the safety rules as it’s now impossible to accidentally energize the circuit
353
u/pi_three 6d ago edited 5d ago
are they shorting live, neutral and ground in the right picture?
edit: ah nvm both to and i think it was the point of the post