That's pretty horrific... shows how much standards vary between countries. You better sleeve your cpc here or you're not passing inspection, and not have any conductor showing at the phase terminations.
And those exposed bus bars?
Not sure which big ass cables you're referring to, but if it's the cpc, if you have a cable with more conductors than is functionally necessary, you connect the unused conductors to earth here. Floating (potential) conductors are a no-no.
What do you mean by "sleeve your cpc"?
Granted, the sparky who wired this panel could have been a little neater but there's nothing that I see that would make an inspector lose his lunch. I've seen horrific on Utube with some of the absolute shit shows that some UK sparky's have to unfuck.
Those exposed bus bars are neutral (ground). To make it easy to tie in the white (neutral) and ground. What's the issue with that? None that I see.
1/ The large bare CPC "Earth" conductor appears to be tinned copper not aluminum (look at the end near the terminal)
2/ The big issue is the exposed phase teminals. Especially the input to the main (200A) isolator. Even inside a metal box, in the UK these would have to be enclosed in insulation except for cable entry and screw access. a finger should not be able to touch them accidentally. see pic of UK one.
3/ The two large wires connected together are the CPC (earth) and Netural. A connection which according to some does not exist.
Yeeah, no. In most cases, you don't have a choice over here about what the feed-in from the utility company is going to be up to the demarc; it's almost always going to be
all aluminum. What you're seeing on the end of the "CPC" wire is properly applied NOALOX, a compound used to prevent the usual hazards of "aluminum oxide poisoning" (aluminum rust contamination) of the connections.
Where the demarc is relative to a service panel will vary from locality to locality, and will be dependent upon type of service/zoning. The demarc may be at the meter, it may be a standalone breaker in a box between the meter and your service panel, it may be the main breaker in your service panel.
We do not have multi-phase power here... we have center-tapped 240V (allegedly
) single-phase split across 2 busses in the box. To make it convenient to get 240V for med-large appliances like dryers, ranges and cooktops, those busses are configured such that every other slot alternates which bus is tapped, which allows one to install a 2-pole breaker with internal common trip that taps both busses at the same time.
All GND and NEUTRAL returns ultimately connect to the same main GND/Neutral busses, which are mechanically and electrically attached to the main CB panel itself, such that
once the cover is closed, everything is contained inside a "Grounded" "Fire-Resistant" enclosure and any fault is contained. We do not concern ourselves that a sparky might stick a finger in a stoopit place when the cover is removed. S/he is expected to know better. As the box itself is at GND/NEUTRAL potential, there is no need to sleeve the grounds from ROMEX, etc.
Adding GFCI complicates the picture, as a pigtail to NEUTRAL/GND is required for the breaker. But it mostly just adds another layer of spaghetti; if run tidily with correct routing, troubleshooting is pretty straightforward.
You will usually
only see sleeved/insulated GND wires in commercial/industrial installations where everything is pulled through conduit. I
personally prefer to see the conduit run as only a redundant GND and all connections inside with a separate "explicit" copper GND conductor, but to my knowledge, it is still "to code" to use the conduit itself as the primary GND in most applications. Even BX-shielded cable complies, IIRC.
mnem
*tzzzt*