Thread: Estimate of wiring in a 16 amp 240 circuit

16 amps is the common 'Heavy Duty' current rating for outlets in England/parts of Europe. Plugs are 'Cee Form' style usually - we use them a lot at work for large lighting circuits. See pic below. You would have no dramas fitting an Australian style 15 amp plug and using it on a 15 amp socket outlet as for a start, that outlet will be protected by a 16 or 20 amp breaker anyway and secondly you'll hardly ever use the machine turned up flat out, so mostly it will be using much less power.

Depends on how many 16amp “tools” you are using at one time??
Can you give us a little more detail? Conduit size you have installed etc??
Do you have a sub board in the shed? And if so what’s the power rating?? Cable size??

Take some photos so we can see the setup

Cheers Lemo

Hello Lemo,

At the moment there is a just one dual power outlet. It is a combined light switch and single power outlet. The power to the shed was probably put in when Moses was a young fella. The conduit is galvanised metal pipe that I am pretty certain has seen better days. There is no circuit board in the shed. I would not be surprised that if an electrician inspected the current set up they would recommend that it be replaced asap.

I will be laying new electrical conduit. I am not certain of the size of the electrical conduit as I would like to future proof the trench. The new conduit would need to run one triple core wire to replace the existing circuit; a new 15 amp circuit and enough capacity of wires to supply lights and power outlets to the "new" four bay shed. At the moment I would just like to upgrade the old shed and at the same time allow the conduit in the new trench to have enough capacity for later. The old shed is in between my house and the "new" shed. So Stage 1 will start at the house - link up to the old shed. Then Stage 2 will dog-leg via the "old" shed to the "new" shed.

The new shed is already constructed - it is just much "newer" than the old shed. I do the majority of the power tool work in the "old" shed.

Kind regards
Lionel

Originally Posted by Lemo

Depends on how many 16amp “tools” you are using at one time??
Can you give us a little more detail? Conduit size you have installed etc??
Do you have a sub board in the shed? And if so what’s the power rating?? Cable size??

Take some photos so we can see the setup

Cheers Lemo

If he had a 15 amp outlet installed it should be on a seperate circuit so based on this I assumed only one at a time.

Put a new sub board in the shed. Run a 15A power outlet, a couple of GPOs and lights from it.
While you're putting in the conduit, run another conduit with CAT6 in it for the workshop computer.

Originally Posted by Mick_Marsh

Put a new sub board in the shed. Run a 15A power outlet, a couple of GPOs and lights from it.
While you're putting in the conduit, run another conduit with CAT6 in it for the workshop computer.

And to do that i would use 4mm cable to the shed minimum.

Ok
So next question
Single or 3 phase?

What’s your house supply like? Old, new, single or three phase?

If you just want to get some conduit in the ground and have an electrician actually come and have a look and offer site specific advice etc?? I’d suggest as above lay say a 32 or 40mmHD conduit and maybe the additional one for the data (computer) ? Depends how good your wi-fi is?

Hope this help a little?

Cheers Lemo

From my experience I would recommend a 50mm conduit and 6mm sub-main cable whether its 1 or 3ph and a small switchboard. When you're putting stuff in the ground, go bigger, always. Unless you're just running power to a single appliance like a pump where the the load is exact and not likely to change.
As Mick says, chuck in an extra conduit incase you want to run data in the future.
For that short run, the larger cable and conduit makes negligible cost difference.