Quote:
Originally Posted by sailingdog
TB-
This only works if you've got enough space to have individual circuits for each piece of equipment. If you have to gang multiple pieces of equipment on a single breaker, which is often the case... you really want to have fuses in-line for each piece of equipment.
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SD, you can get some pretty small 'in-line style' circuit breakers these days so size is not really an issue. Circuit-breakers also inherently tend to be more reliable than fuses - because there's no fuse wire to go high resistance on you! (yes, I've had it happen). And it doesn't matter how many times they trip (within reason) they can be reset very quickly... but once they fail, if you're well out of sight of land on a dark night, you're stuffed - unlike a fuse where you can just pop another one in.
The above notwithstanding, fuses are simpler, way cheaper and far less bother for most people so they do still have their place on anything other than some luxury cruiser. Each to their own.
A Point of Trivia of No Relevance To This Thread: Most fuses (all that I've ever known, anyways) are
not designed to blow at their fuse rating but at some figure above it instead. eg. a 2A fuse will hold 2 Amps forever, but will blow quite happily at 3... but a 2A circuit breaker OTOH will trip just above 2 amps.
