Fusebox

Documentation

General information for everyone

• Our kitchen groups & the West/Aux space are powered by the fusebox in the dirtyroom behind the left tall fridge. In the event of an outage, check there first.
• This fusebox is powered from the downstairs Urban resort fusebox, NOT the fusebox on this floor level.
• If a fuse blows there, you need to contact Urban resort (and wait for Urban resort to replace it, which may well mean "office hours"!).
• For all matters regarding this fusebox, please contact Ultratux, justa, Remko, or a board member.

Groups layout

From left to right, there are 4 groups, each group consists of two switches; A Ground Fault Switch/Breaker, and a 'fuse'. More on that below.

• Group X => three-phase group only used in the dirty room for special three-phase equipment.
• Group 1 => powers kitchen group 'yellow', including dishwasher and (close-in-) water boiler.
• Group 2 => powers kitchen group 'green', this one should preferably be used to hook up most coffee makers, tea kettles and the like.
• Group 3 => Powers entirety of Dirty_room plus the entirety of West_space, including one half of the redundant power to the servers there.

NOTE WELL: The fuse of a group DOES NOT act as breaker; to switch off a group completely, YOU MUST switch off the breaker too (So: both switches)

More technical background information

First off, we are powered by 3x16A because the feed cable is rated for only that; this presented us with a problem, since we also need to use 16A fuses, otherwise many power-hungry devices might trip our 10A fuses too often. We have chosen a middle ground: we deploy 13A fuses. This means that the fuses blowing in our own (accessible) fusebox has a only-slightly better chance than the fuses blowing in the (inaccessible) fusebox of Urban resort. We have to await what the day to day practice shows. The electrician did inform us that, by their nature, the fusibles downstairs will trip much slower in the event of a short than our fusebox breakers. However, in the event of an overload, as opposed to a short, there is no telling whether our side blows first, or theirs. In the meantime, we've had numerous overload situations, all caused by overusing kitchen equipment, and all of those times the fuse on our side blew, not the one in Urban Resort's fusebox, so that is good. The fact we used so much cooking equipment to cause to blow them, otoh, was not good.

I have planned to make a little box with a couple of leds that show whether all three phases are available. The box came from AliExpress. Sadly, unknown to me at the time, it is not rated to be connected more than 2 minutes. This is a setback, I wanted 3 LEDs so they could be monitored continuously. I'm still pondering on a solution. This may be instrumental to ascertain whether a fuse at Urban resort has blown or not.

About the aforementioned two switches per group; one (the narrower one) is a 13 amp 'fuse'. The wider one (with the brown buttons) is a combination of GFS and 16 amp fuse. The latter one cuts both phase and return conduits, so it is a breaker. The narrow 'fuse' IS NOT a breaker !!

Information for using heavy tri-phase power equipment in our dirty room

We have also made a 3-phase CEEform outlet for use with special equipment. There are a number of caveats with using that though, we URGE anyone that contemplates using that to read and understand the information listed here below:

The CEEform outlet power usage adds up to the total power per phase. Concrete, this means that if your 3-phase machine draws 12 amps per phase, and at the same time 
a kitchen group draws 12 amps too, that the fuse at Urban resort will probably blow, either immediately at powering-on the machine, or after a while (couple of 
seconds to couple of minutes) of being overloaded. 

If that happens on a friday night, you may well have caused a great problem for all the other members/attendees over the weekend if no Urban resort employee can come over to replace the fuse. To give a worst-case example. To minimize this risk, you might:

• Preferably only use the machine during business hours, or on nights which are followed by a business day (ie. Sunday night through Thursday night)
• Make sure that there is no cooking, coffee making, tea making and no running dishwasher or vacuuming at the time you use the machinery. Ask members to consider waiting a moment.
• Especially try to make sure to avoid blowing a fuse if it will impact a big public event following it or under way.
• If the machine or equipment has not ever been used before at our place, please consider doing the first test during UR business hours.

That said... interest in the three-phase outlet has been null, probably because we don't own such equipment. The group has as yet not even been wired up...

If we all follow these suggestions we can ensure that the risk to inconvenience other members gets minimized, or eliminated altogether.