This week's dramas
Yesterday (Friday) everything was going fine until I got in the car to get to work. I have the ultimate of mod-cons, a garage door opener... which didn't work. Hmm. I got out, looked and noticed no lights on the unit. It is just near the meter box, so I checked that and the RCD (Residual current device aka ground fault interrupter aka safety switch) had tripped. I reset it, checked the house and it tripped again.
Hmmm.
I turned off all the breakers, reset it and tried turning the breakers on one by one to figure out which circuit it was on. This is when I got really confused. Everything was on, but I didn't seem to have any power in the house, then I noticed one circuit breaker didn't make that nice thunk when it was toggled.
Too complicated. Luckily I work with an electrician. Unfortunately he was out at site. Fortunately he was due back that afternoon.
Jump forward a few hours and picture us standing around the meter box with various gadgets looking confused. Well, I was confused, he knew what he was doing.
Turns out one circuit breaker was toast, so that got replaced, but another circuit was showing a fault to ground. Not a dead short, but less resistance than there should be. So that led to much running around with various testers. I had discovered where the circuits in my house go which is nice. We traced it down to a surge protector.
We're not sure if the surge protector had failed or was doing what it is suppose to be doing. My line voltage was 250V yesterday (is 241V at the moment), which is higher than you want it to be, which reminds me I need to ask the power people about that. Anyway, the surge protector might have been detecting the 250V as a surge, which dumps to ground and that triggers the RCD... or it might be just dicky. Anyway, we pulled it out and everything is good now.
The other suspicious thing was it had been raining for about 12hrs. The other time it tripped (and I was on holidays) was also when we got a lot of rain, so it might be water getting in somewhere, but we couldn't find anything obvious. I'll be getting up on the roof (When it's not wet and windy) and checking for possible leaks up there too.
It made things slightly more interesting for the day.
I'm still a little paranoid it hasn't fixed the problem, but so far, so good.
Hmmm.
I turned off all the breakers, reset it and tried turning the breakers on one by one to figure out which circuit it was on. This is when I got really confused. Everything was on, but I didn't seem to have any power in the house, then I noticed one circuit breaker didn't make that nice thunk when it was toggled.
Too complicated. Luckily I work with an electrician. Unfortunately he was out at site. Fortunately he was due back that afternoon.
Jump forward a few hours and picture us standing around the meter box with various gadgets looking confused. Well, I was confused, he knew what he was doing.
Turns out one circuit breaker was toast, so that got replaced, but another circuit was showing a fault to ground. Not a dead short, but less resistance than there should be. So that led to much running around with various testers. I had discovered where the circuits in my house go which is nice. We traced it down to a surge protector.
We're not sure if the surge protector had failed or was doing what it is suppose to be doing. My line voltage was 250V yesterday (is 241V at the moment), which is higher than you want it to be, which reminds me I need to ask the power people about that. Anyway, the surge protector might have been detecting the 250V as a surge, which dumps to ground and that triggers the RCD... or it might be just dicky. Anyway, we pulled it out and everything is good now.
The other suspicious thing was it had been raining for about 12hrs. The other time it tripped (and I was on holidays) was also when we got a lot of rain, so it might be water getting in somewhere, but we couldn't find anything obvious. I'll be getting up on the roof (When it's not wet and windy) and checking for possible leaks up there too.
It made things slightly more interesting for the day.
I'm still a little paranoid it hasn't fixed the problem, but so far, so good.