The standard for electrical installation in France is have armoured conduit threaded with individual wires for positive, neutral and occasionally earth. This is all good and well until one of two problems occurs.
Firstly where several connections have been made you can have upwards of 10 individual wires running through a single conduit. This makes making changes to the system very difficult because (even when correctly coloured) 4 blue wires will look exactly the same at either end.
Secondly it seems to encourage the amateur, have a go, electrician to, well... have a go! This time you can guarantee that no wire remains the same colour on its way into or out of a junction box. Wiring up a light with yellow and green wire for the positive gives you a distinctly uneasy feeling and becomes a journey into the unknown.
I refuse to do anything with electricity while I'm here. 110 was bad enough, but I can only imagine what would happen with 220.
ReplyDeleteIt seems even more worrisome, as to me, red is positive, black is negative, and green is ground. I doubt I'd know what to make of a French junction box.