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Thread: CB's wired upside down

  1. #1
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    CB's wired upside down

    Does anyone know these circuit breakers and why they were wired feed from the bottom, load on top?

    Can I change to conventional without breaking anything?

    Thanks in advance

    Sent from my SM-A226B using Tapatalk

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    I have never seen this make of breaker plus searching on Google give no results.
    Is there line load markings or sketch maybe on them, that can tell you which side is line and which is load?
    If the breakers work like a normal SA breaker, line at top and load at bottom, then you can swop them the right way round.
    Other then that I have no advice

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  4. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by Thys LOW Elektries View Post
    I have never seen this make of breaker plus searching on Google give no results.
    Is there line load markings or sketch maybe on them, that can tell you which side is line and which is load?
    If the breakers work like a normal SA breaker, line at top and load at bottom, then you can swop them the right way round.
    Other then that I have no advice
    Thanks Thys. Appreciate your help

    Sent from my SM-A226B using Tapatalk

  5. #4
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    It looks like it was the old ABB circuit breaker.



    https://new.abb.com/low-voltage/prod...ty-and-comfort
    Comments are my opinion, unless regulations are attached to support the comment. This is social media, not a court room.

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    Like many things in SA, the only reason circuit breakers are wired upside down, must be because some person decided to make it like that many years ago, and so the fuchs, which became heineman which is now CBI, which dominated the SA market for many years. Unfortunately they have priced themselves out the market. You can tell those breakers are really old, by the exposed contacts, you cannot touch live contacts with a standard test finger on any new circuit breakers.

    SA does things backwards, if you look at quality circuit breakers, like ABB you will notice the terminal for a forked busbar (which by the way works way better than a pin busbar, it frees up the terminals for the wires which reduces the chase of loose connections, which is very common with cheap mcb's which allow the wire to be inserted behind the plate) is at the bottom.

    An mcb marked line and load will always take preference.

    I think it is silly that we still feed into the top of the breaker and out the bottom, especially now that twin+e is the prefered wiring method.

    In all my solar installs I wire into the bottom of the main switch and out the top (unless I use a main switch labeled line/load , which doesn't happen), the reason is because it saves the bridge wire from the bottom onto the top of the circuit breakers, it was done like thing for many many years, once again someone replaced an old green double heineman main switch with a newer style main switch and so all the sheep followed.
    Comments are my opinion, unless regulations are attached to support the comment. This is social media, not a court room.

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    I believe we should fix this problem and make it simple, main switch should be wired to suit the ELU and breaker should be line at the bottom, to cut out the silly bridge wire. I suppose if we had qualified people in the industry who use a little common sense it would be easy, lets just leave it here.

    IT would be a lot simpler to fault find if DBs were wired with less bridge wires, simple busbar connections would make it way easier.

    Take note of a typical SA wired DB, it's a mess (copied from another post on this platform)

    Comments are my opinion, unless regulations are attached to support the comment. This is social media, not a court room.

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    I 100% agree that the method uses here is not ideal, the now more common DIN mount breakers which I assume is the same as the UK can be done with line at the bottom.

    However markings take president.

    Look at how neat the DBs are in the UK vs here.

    Also my pet hate is cable ties to make it neat, when it comes to fault finding and cable locating it's a nightmare in the DB.

    Sent from my CPH2197 using Tapatalk

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