- Joined
- Nov 28, 2009
- Messages
- 14,677
- Reaction score
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A case of never believe what the customer says.
The reported fault was "half the electrics in the house are not working" I was expecting a split board fault. But when I got there the actual issue was 1 socket and 1 light not working. The light was a dud lamp FFS. So that just left 1 socket not working.
Old house wired in red / black. Unscrew dead socket, a single brown / blue t&e feeds it which goes down under the floor, laminate and tiled floor no hope of lifting floor boards.
The other side of the wall from this socket is a shiny new kitchen. Brown / blue wiring in the kitchen so thinking it must be spurred from a socket in there. Every socket off, no spur feed. Thinking must be a hidden junction box and beginning to fret about the lack of access to under the floor.
Testing shows in fact N and E connected back to CU just not L which is why I was thinking cable fallen out of terminal in accessory or JB.
Then the Eureka moment. The house is heated by storage heaters, but hold on no storage heater in the living room. Sure enough another quick test shows this socket to be connected to the "living room" mcb on the off peak CU.
The original storage heater point was the other side of the room and it had been extended from there to the present socket hence the brown / blue, probably done as part of the kitchen refit.
So it can't have ever worked properly, so why wait and then call someone else out to say it has "stopped working"?
Took me 45 minutes to find and correct. It would probably have been less had I not been distracted by the new kitchen and thinking it must be associated with that.
The reported fault was "half the electrics in the house are not working" I was expecting a split board fault. But when I got there the actual issue was 1 socket and 1 light not working. The light was a dud lamp FFS. So that just left 1 socket not working.
Old house wired in red / black. Unscrew dead socket, a single brown / blue t&e feeds it which goes down under the floor, laminate and tiled floor no hope of lifting floor boards.
The other side of the wall from this socket is a shiny new kitchen. Brown / blue wiring in the kitchen so thinking it must be spurred from a socket in there. Every socket off, no spur feed. Thinking must be a hidden junction box and beginning to fret about the lack of access to under the floor.
Testing shows in fact N and E connected back to CU just not L which is why I was thinking cable fallen out of terminal in accessory or JB.
Then the Eureka moment. The house is heated by storage heaters, but hold on no storage heater in the living room. Sure enough another quick test shows this socket to be connected to the "living room" mcb on the off peak CU.
The original storage heater point was the other side of the room and it had been extended from there to the present socket hence the brown / blue, probably done as part of the kitchen refit.
So it can't have ever worked properly, so why wait and then call someone else out to say it has "stopped working"?
Took me 45 minutes to find and correct. It would probably have been less had I not been distracted by the new kitchen and thinking it must be associated with that.