Substandard Electric Cable

[Triassic]

Substandard and counterfeit cable, labelled with fake official standards and accreditations, is one of the biggest kicks to the UK economy, and, worse, a potential killer, say cable industry leaders.

 

Substandard Cables

After a six-year campaign to clean up cable, industry White Knights are taking the crusade to Westminster and calling for better market surveillance and for all cable sold in the UK to be independently third party approved.

 

While cable failure can cost £millions when re-fitting large and complex projects, more importantly it can cost lives. Installers and suppliers are victims too. Buying as specified in good faith and carefully matching specifications to labels and cable markings often means nothing. Despite their best efforts, installers and suppliers’ livelihoods and reputations are at stake.

 

The Approved Cables Initiative (ACI), which launched in 2010, investigates all kinds of suspect cable — be it armoured, house wiring flex, fire-performance cables and more. While house fire causes are often recorded as a ‘faulty appliance’ — there is every chance a fault could lie with the fake or under-specified cable fitted.

 

So where does the problem lie:

• Standards aren’t wholly adhered to in the UK.
• There are too few checks on imported cables.
• About 70% of cable sold in the UK is imported and, of that, ACI believes half doesn’t meet a recognised Standard.
• Some distributors encourage the under specification of cable by manufacturers.

 

source     https://medium.com/@mauriziobragagni/britains-counterfeit-cable-the-ticking-time-bomb-e9fce0e38127

 

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Should we we be Worried?

Edited June 25, 2017 by Triassic

[Crofter]

Interesting, and slightly worrying. Cable is not especially complex stuff... what can go wrong with it? Wrong material used for insulator? Wires thinner than stated? Poor quality copper leading to breaks and potential for arcing?

[Jeremy Harris]

Copper is relatively expensive, so there are cables around (mainly from the Far East) that use alloys, or even copper plated wires, rather than solid copper.  This increases the cable resistance, and reduces the current handling capacity.  There's also scams with the insulation, using materials that breakdown or crack with age, or that don't have the required heat resistance.

 

I've never seen domestic fixed wiring cable that's looked dodgy, but I did buy (from ebay) a spare charger for my camera battery that didn't have a UK plug on it.  When I cut the plug off to fit one, I found that the two core cable wasn't double insulated and that the wires inside were made of some very fine non-copper metal. 

[ToughButterCup]

Hmmm, bit like the Internet cabling which is alleged to be all copper. I have it on good authority, that aluminium is a common substitute.....

[PeterW]

2 minutes ago, recoveringacademic said:

Hmmm, bit like the Internet cabling which is alleged to be all copper. I have it on good authority, that aluminium is a common substitute.....

 

So CatX cable can be what's called CCA- Copper Clad Aluminium. The issue is the suppliers who sell CCA as solid copper as it's fairly difficult to tell in cut lengths but the boxes of CCA are much lighter than a box of the solid copper. 

 

I think there is a quick chemical way to check but @JSHarris would need to help me with that ..!

[Jeremy Harris]

I get the feeling that a lot of the markings put on Chinese-made goods that are sold by drop shippers and the like are just there for show.  It's probably a bit like Chinglish, in that the manufacturers may not even have anyone that can read English, so they never even notice that the wording is completely wrong.

Edited June 25, 2017 by JSHarris
removed reference to cable

[SteamyTea]

Back in the early 90's, there was an incident with a sauna.

Apparently the cable was sub-standard and the cleaners had managed to trap and crush it under the panel (the rules for installation got changed after).

Either fault on its own was not enough to cause a fire, but the combination of the two was.

So this is not a new problem.

[Nickfromwales]

Thread tidied ?