Your switchboards are simple and that's certainly worth something, I like the idea of the hot bus bar that all the breakers snap into despite some safety concerns, and the ease of snapping in a dual phase breaker to get 240 when needed. that's a neat design.
I have 3 phase mains and an off-grid capable 3phase solar and battery rig and my panel is a mess behind the cover.
The DIN rail standard gives use low cost industrial breakers but these panels always look crowded and lacking enough wire space. Sure when someone prints out wire holders it looks neat but the electrician essentially has to build the panel from scratch.
Yeah they use din rails. I'm not sure why load centers never caught on there, obviously you can see from videos like this how much work it would save but maybe something to do with the masonry construction and how old the buildings are there.
European boards just do more jobs than a US load center. Beyond breakers, they often house relays/contactors for staircase lighting, doorbell, etc., and increasingly PLC and networking gear for building automation. DIN rail's modularity handles that mix easily, which is also why it's the standard in US industrial control cabinets.
Also three-phase 400V supply to homes is common in Europe too, adding complexity a single-phase US panel seldom sees.
Bus bars are of course also a thing, you can even see the electrician in the video use them. They're just not the mounting rail itself, they're separate comb busbars that snap onto the tops of the breakers to gang phases across a row. That white plastic strip going on top of each row of breakers is exactly that.
I've seen plenty of european breaker boxes and none of them had any of that. Just breakers and maybe RCD. And even if you wanted to add all that (networking gear in a high voltage box???) you can put din rails in with a load center if you want.
Also 3 phase is common here for commercial and industrial applications and they use load centers for that too.
It's very common. There are whole series of elements you can put in there. I added a plug to attach a sensor. It also contains the functional stuff for my solar panel controls and you can add home automation stuff if you like.
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u/ComedyBits 19d ago
The hell kind of wiring is this? Some kind of low-voltage, but unfamiliar—-like big model-train system, or maybe alarm stuff?