Good morning, all from aldi, this portable mains kit with two usb ports. So what this is is for camping sites where power, apparently because i've not been on a camping site, is supplied via one of these 16 amp. Is it a commando plug? This? Is the plug? Um, so the power will be on a socket, so this contains the uh 16 amp plug also 15 meters of orange cable, and then this box, so i'll move that slightly and on this box are three mains outlets uh just down here. There are a couple of usb ports, but up here, there's this interesting consumer unit or distribution board with a couple of breakers um already fitted into it and then there's a neon light.

So let's get it out of its box and take a closer look at it. So here it is out of its box um there's the 16 amp plug it's a type p one two three four: is that real and then there's the 15 meters of mains cable? This is rated at 16 amps. You know that, because the mcb, the miniature circuit breaker, is a c16 type under these flaps are the three 13 amp socket outlets. There's also the dual usb there.

But the interesting bit about this, i think, is the um. Are the circuit breakers in this distribution board or consumer unit and it's actually a din rail type? So let's look at a few things uh. Firstly, this, as i say, p, uh type p, one two three four sixteen amps now is that for six hours, two hundred to 250 volts 50, 60 hertz, 2 pin plus earth and it's ip44 rated for moisture. I believe that is, and let's have a close-up look at these circuit breakers, so this is an mcb, a miniature circuit breaker, this breaks.

If the current 16 amps is exceeded, it also breaks if there's a short circuit or a very high current pulse. This is a c rated unit, i think, there's also, b and d, so this is a sort of medium in terms of how quickly it responds um and also what sort of over current it can tolerate for how long? Because this thing is thermally triggered - or at least it's partially thermally triggered, but it's also partially um magnetically triggered it's quite an interesting, complex thing inside um. Another issue here is that this is apparently two breakers mechanically linked by a pin running through this arm. So is there any electrical cool connection between these two breakers or are they entirely separate, um just linked by this arm? These are branded pop, which is an interesting name.

Moving on to this one, this is an rcd. I believe 30 milliamps is the above 30 milliamps of differential between current in the live and current in the neutral. It will trigger this thing to switch off um. If there is a different current in live to neutral, then it means current is leaking somewhere, not necessarily through to earth or not.

What this knows is earth. In fact, this doesn't even know about earth, because earth doesn't connect to this at all, but if it leaks anywhere because um, that could mean it's leaking through a human being 30 milliamps and this thing will trigger now. This has also got a rating of 25 amps, but i don't think it's an rcbo which is a residual current breaker with overload with current overload. I don't think it's that, because there would be no point because you've already got a breaker here.

So i think this is just an rcd and i think it's just rated at 25 amps, because the point is live and neutral have to go through little windings on a on a ferrite for it to detect a differential current and those windings will be capable of Taking a certain current, so i think this is just an rcd test button there, which puts a resistor across now. I believe it puts it across um live after the differential. Current is measured and neutral before so that that simulates, a current imbalance through this resistor, whatever value that might be, and that will trigger the unit to switch off when you press the test button. So let's get inside this thing.

First, i'm going to take these pipe clips off. I believe these are so that you can clip it onto a tent pole if you want mains in your tent supplied from the site mains, the site 16 amp mains uh. What else can i say about this? Yes, 29.95 or something like that, this cost from aldi. Now i've already got one of these.

You may have seen it in my shed and i do believe that was 25 pounds, so prices are going up. Let's take that hook off as well, and these screws in here are not only tri-wing but they're very deeply set into the unit they're down here somewhere. So i had to buy a special toolkit uh here it is and um. I bought this because it's all security bits, but they're long, i think they're 75 millimeter um the type 3 tri-wing, which is there that seems to fit i'll, put a link to this.

Actually, because i've got this on ebay from a uk set i'll put that in the description. So let's just loosen these off and then i should be able to do the remainder of this just holding on to that bit by finger right. That's the screws all undone! Well, they all fall out. Most of them have okay and now this front comes off and we can see the din rail there that the breakers are attached to so they're standard din rail breakers.

So you could actually um replace these quite easily. So how does this wiring work? Well, mains comes in on this orange cable. It runs up to the top and into yes. It goes into the rcd first runs through the rcd and there's a couple of cables that run back up to the top again into the mcb, the circuit breaker 16 amp out of there and into the mains outlets, which are all paralleled up with their earths.

Running back to the incoming earth, the other thing there is in here is a little mains to 5 volt switch mode power supply and that supplies 5 volts to the usb sockets on the front. Now this is interesting. The neon indicator here is wired between live and earth, which is really strange. Why would you put the indicator light between live and earth? If all it is, is a power indicator and it does say on the box power indicator um i'll, just check the manual.

Yes, it just says power indicator light, but wired between live and earth. It actually tells you far more than that. It tells you that there is a good earth return back to the the site earth, because if the earth was broken at any point, then this indicator wouldn't light up. It also works as a live and neutral reversed.

You can't quite say reverse polarity, but if live and neutral are reversed, then this would be wired between neutral and earth and there should never be enough voltage between neutral and earth to strike the neon. So that's not just a power indicator light and i must i did notice on the one in the shed that it um burns well burns it lights up very dim, which is interesting. I wonder if it's got a very high value resistor in it, because the other thing it's going to do wired between live and earth is it's going to actually draw some current from live and therefore put a slight offset between the live current and the uh neutral. Current because some of the live current is going to leak down to earth through the neon, so the neon must be taking far less than the 30 milliamp trip current of the rcd, but that's really interesting and no mention of it in the manual.

In fact, this gets even weirder because it says here: fault no power to electrical devices, check it's plugged in check that the indicator light is on, and then it says if the power indicator light is on, but there's still no power check. The rcd has not tripped. Well, that's bizarre, because if the rcd trips and that it's in it's off state at the moment, then no power is going to get down to the sockets and therefore the indicator light can't be on. So how can you have a condition where the power indicator light? Is on but there's no power on the sockets.

This manual is strange, so that's what's inside a portable mains kit designed for use on campsites and they say with usb. They seem very keen on the fact that this has got usb um. I reckon this would actually make quite a good test bed for circuit breakers, because you've got your mains coming in uh. You've got lots of sockets on the output, which you can load up with high power devices to test uh circuit breakers.

So that could be quite useful for doing sort of circuit, breaker and rcd analysis yeah interesting, but that's it. This is the adventure ridge, uh portable mains kit, with usb 30 pounds from aldi cheerio.