Consumer Units For Your Home

Consumer units are effectively the modern replacement for old fashioned fuse boxes and re preferable to fuse boxes for a number of reasons. If you still have a fuse box in your home then you should consider changing over when you get the chance because consumer units are more beneficial. Rather than containing multiple fuses, they tend to house circuit breakers and residual current devices.

Rather than having to completely replace whole fuses it is possible to reset a circuit breaker when it is tripped. This means it’s easier to get your electricity back up and running and you don’t need to fish around the tool box or the kitchen drawers in the dark trying to find a replacement fuse.

Miniature circuit breakers can detect electrical faults and trip out the circuit before that fault becomes a considerably larger problem. This can prevent damage to wiring and, worse still, damage and fire in your property. For example, the circuit breaker can detect a surge in load and trip the circuit before wiring catches fire and spreads quickly through the house. Once tripped it is easier to reset miniature circuit breakers that are found in consumer units than it is to replace fuses in your fuse box.

Consumer units also offer greater safety to you and others that live in your house. If you were to cut through an electric cable then the circuit breaker will usually detect this in a tiny fraction of a second and cut the power. This means that you are less likely to suffer a serious electric shock and, instead, will simply need to reset the circuit breaker.

The miniature circuit breakers in consumer units are also more able to withstand being repeatedly tripped too. Fuses tend to blow after a single incident and this means replacing them. In contrast, a circuit breaker which also comes in various ampages just like fuses, can cope with the excess heat that is delivered to them and if they contain a vacuum inside too then this means that they will continue to perform even after they have been tripped repeatedly.


With consumer units and a contactor from expert-electrical.co.uk you can be sure that you will receive high quality industrial electrical equipment at an affordable price.