@ Gervase Webb - "2.5 metres of this for a mere £11,750.00"

But if you went for the 5m cable you'd get a further 2.5 metres for just £7,150 more - get it before they realise they're just throwing this stuff away!

The thing I don't get is this: these short 2.5m power cables from the socket to the "kettle" are in some fashion highly-engineered (though the plugs that plug into the wall don't look very special). But behind your office's or studio's socket is presumably pretty bog-standard not-very-highly-specified cabling - as Paul Burke above suggests - that brings the power through all sorts of cobbled-together links and joins over many tens of miles from wherever it is generated, and presumably somewhere in there is a weakest link, if not hundreds of them.