Wiring and cabling practices in Vietnam – take a quick look…

Vietnam is an amazing country in many ways, especially in the manner and sheer speed with which it has brought itself back from the brink of complete collapse at the end of the Vietnam War (or the ‘American War’ as the Vietnamese call it).

When the Viet Cong fighters finally overran Hanoi – apart from the sheer human cost (estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 800,000 to 3.1 million, while some 200,000 to 300,000 Cambodians, 20,000 to 200,000 Laotians, and 58,220 US service members also died in the conflict) – the damage to the countries’ infrastructures was enormous. 

American planes dropped seven million tons of ordnance – three times the amount they had dropped in World War II – as well as napalm and chemical defoliants. This devastated cities, buildings, infrastructure, farmland and vegetation. Virtually all of Vietnam’s powerplant was smashed, most roads were severely damaged, the railway inoperable, nearly all major bridges blown up, and the spraying of Agent Orange resulted in massive forest and crop defoliation.

Yet Vietnam came back quickly, and although still communist, now appears to be an ‘Asian Tiger’, rather on the Chinese model…

…but judging from my visit, the electrics have yet to catch up. They are typically similar to electrical installations in so-called ‘third-world’ and developing countries the world over. 

All up in the air!

Take a look at the photos. Like many such countries, the LV cabling doesn’t go underground but above. Photo 1 shows an entirely commonplace installation in the Northern city of Hanoi. Although not the worst I saw by far (unfortunately I didn’t always have my camera with me to record these), this is a complete rat’s nest of LV cables of various kinds – and all exposed to great summer heat, constant high humidity and often quite extraordinarily heavy rainfall (not to mention wind, very high traffic fumes, and in some areas, poor people trying to get free electricity by attaching their own cabling!).

Even the heavy transfomers and some metering units were mounted on poles high up. Mind you, I’ve seen worse in other countries. This installation is actually quite tidy compared with some.

Photo 2 shows an installation being repaired and tidied up (this is all relative) by the utility. At least they were using an access platform and not a ladder, although not being a dedicated unit it ran the risk of the engineer colliding with the cabling if the operator wasn’t on the ball with the controls. Photo 3 shows another view of the same operation, which was being hampered by hundreds of passing small motorcycles and scooters (Vietnam has 34 million of these).

Photo 4 shows a wooden post in a village workshop carrying a mains switch – with mains cable supply from above of course – feeding a three-gang socket selotaped to the post. The installation was partially exposed to rainwater, but not only that, the two-pin plug had to be held against the socket to gain sufficient contact for the driven machine to work. 

I saw this being done to operate a coconut scouring machine, which was itself highly dangerous as it could take fingers off in a moment!

Photo 5 shows an interesting luminaire made of wooden basket weave. Nothing wrong with this in itself (apart from the possible fire risk) and it matched the look of the Mekong riverboat it was affixed to, but I couldn’t see the lampholder itself, and basketweave is not ideal for protecting against finger ingress etc.

In fact, many Vietnamese electrical installations seemed to be of an acceptable standard, particularly in hotels, where that might be expected, though even then it was noteworthy that many lights simply didn’t work – and of those that did, they were so dim that it was nearly impossible to read by them.

So there we are. Vietnam’s a fascinating country but in terms of the electrics, we are very lucky here in Blighty!