Electrical

Oven/cooker installation - circuit shared with shower that's no longer in use

Anonymous user 28 February 2024 - 3.36 PM

Hi, we ordered a replacement built-in electric oven recently (to be hardwired in, replacing our current one that is also hardwired), but the installer refused to fit it because it is rated 16A rather than 40A as per the circuit breaker in our fuse box. He said we would either need to replace the circuit breaker with a 16A one or to order a 32A rated oven instead (strangely he told us that the 16A rating was really unusual for an oven, which turned out not to be true as we can barely find any new ovens rated at 32A - and even our current oven says 15-20A needed in the instructions!). Anyway, we have now had the circuit breaker replaced with a 16A one, which we assume will be fine in theory but there's an added complication in that the cooker circuit is shared with an old shower connection - said connection consisting of a standard wall socket added outside the bathroom, into which the old shower was plugged in (realise this is dodgy - was done by the previous owners, who did a lot of bad DIY!). We no longer have an electric shower at all, as the whole thing was removed when our bathroom was redone a while back - but are wondering if this shared circuit will cause an issue with regulations etc even if there is no longer any shower (given that the wall socket itself is still live so can in theory be switched on and things plugged into it). Would be very grateful for anyone's advice, as we don't want to get the installers back if they refuse to fit it again. You can probably tell we're clueless about all this - hadn't realised the issues until the fitters arrived! Thanks in advance. PS: new oven has a 3.65 kW power rating if that's relevant at all.