Consumer unit trip

[Andy up north]

Hi
I would be very grateful for advice.
I have a circuit breaker in my consumer unit marked B6 which is for lights. It covers lights in 3 rooms.
A friend has been looking after our house for couple of weeks and called me to say that the lights wouldn't come on. I have returned to find the breaker 'tripped'. Resetting it results is a spark at the switch and it immediately retripping.
I have progressively removed bulbs on the circuit (some are multple downlighters). Each time I remove a room of bulbs I think I have found the problem as the breaker resets OK. Then after a minute or so it trips again. After each of the 3 rooms the time to re-tripping after reset gets longer.

I have now removed all lights from the affected rooms (bathroom ones are on transformers which are in the roof space so still on the circuit). Now it takes about 5 minutes before the breaker trips again (having not touched any lights etc, so it is not reacting to a specific action) and now there is no spark at the trip (presumably because there is no load).

We do have mice here as we are quite rural but generally I would say everything is in good nic. I am wondering, is this the sort of thing you would expect to see if the breaker itself was faulty?

thanks

 

[ChrisElectrical88]

If it’s staying on for a short while you might have banged part of the mouse apart ?. Get an electrician in mate, if it’s on 3 rooms some methodical insulation resistance testing won’t take long to locate the fault and hopefully it will be a easy repair.

 

[James]

Also, repeated resets of the breaker on a faulty circuit is likely to have damaged the circuit breaker

Let the electrician know what make and model of breaker it is before they come

and ask for a replacement to be fitted when the fault has been repaired.

It is likely to only add £10 to £20 to the bill and will help remove doubt if you have a similar problem again.