Huh, weird style of doing it. Here, there's a power central in the basement, that splits directly to all apartments individually, with a fusebox just inside each apartment,
That probably requires lots ow expensive wire thicker than 2.5mm^2 used here. The vertical cable is made using really thick one, probably 50mm^2, but the horizontal offshots are all 2.5mm^2. Voltage drops perceptibly if I turn on something powerful like the 2kWt tea-kettle or the 3kWt washing machine.
When redoing all wiring in my apartment in 2012 I wanted to use thicker wire but the price of one meter skyrockets if you try going above 2.5mm^2.
That really should not be needed. Not something silly like someone bought an extra large batch of fuses and they were all bad or something?
More like all the fuses in the country are super-cheap Chinese ones under the NoName brand.
Plus, transient voltage jumps were not uncommon, some industrial stabilizing mechanism somewhere trying to keep the voltage in sane limits. I suppose our fridges and cheap fluorescent light bulbs were responding to these voltage instabilities with huge transient currents.
Before the upgrade, each apartment's fuse box (really a niche between the bathroom and the toilet room) was connected to the ones above and below via two 2mm thick aluminum wires running through a dedicated vertical shaft (resulting in fun and pretty fireworks when one moron from the top floor flooded the entire building, water rushing down that shaft first) The branching was presumably somewhere in the basement. The voltage was low, like about 210V, and could drop to 200.
Mind you, there was no such thing as "ground wire". It was simply not in the state standard, except dedicated three-phase 380V lines for electric stoves. Using 3 wires instead of 2 is horrible waste of precious aluminum only kapitalists self-indulge in, yes? So, when people began purchasing foreign-made appliances like washing machines and such, there was a huge problem: where to attach their ground? Connecting to the water pipes or leaving it hanging in the air: plugging a Euro plug into a Soviet socket is possible if you are very strong or simply use a drill to make the holes bigger, but the ground is left hanging.
I myself, when I began using computers, was connecting the ground via an one-megaOhm resistor to the heating system's pipes. I think I even lost a sound card trying to connect it to a VHS recorder connected to a TV which was connected to a grounded antenna cable while my computer's "ground" was pure 110V delivered through the capacitors of the input filter. I got electric shock a couple times too: one should NOT touch their computer and the under-window radiator at the same time. Thankfully, maximum current through these capacitors is quite small.
I think there are still lots of washing machines in Russia with hanging ground. AFAIR we connected ours to the null wire instead of the non-existent ground. Bad but better than hanging. The backplate of the fuse "box" was use as attach point for the null wire by design, too.
Well, after the 2008 upgrade we got the coveted ground wire: me re-doing all wiring from scratch in 2012 was partly to make all socket to Euro standard with proper ground. That, and the rubber insulation around those aluminum wires beginning to crumble at the barest touch. Also, voltage was too high this time, making me install industrial voltage regulators: our fridges our vintage tube radio-grammophone could not get the 253V joke. My love for over-engineering I used two 10kVA ones, one for the kitchen and the other for the rest of the apartment.
I also made all lighting a separate circuit supported by a 1000 VA UPS. Had to rid of the remaining incandescent bulbs: these were too much.
when choosing your breakers. You won't have stable power otherwise.
