L
lim88
I had a call from a customer living in a 3 year old barn conversion who was getting shocks off the pipe work, cooker, coffee machine and almost all other metal appliances in his house. He then told me if he switches of the cooker isolator the fault goes away.
So i thought ideal easy job, just test to see if its the cooker or the cable between the cooker and isolator thats the cause. I knew it wasn't going to be quite as simple as soon as I got a shock off the cpc's on the cooker circuit with the mcb locked off.
To cut a long story short there were three ccu each feed on its own cable from the supply, but after testing at every possible place and a lot of running around it became apparent that the fault was not caused by any part of the installation, but by 80v entering the installation on the main earthing conductor.
So I called out western power distribution and after they inspected everything on the supply they said they could find no problems. We were starting to scratch our heads, until one of them spotted further down their line a rather interesting supply.
Basically in one of the old barns that was still used as a barn there was the distributor's supply cable going in to their cut out as usual, with no fuse in the cut out (well not during the time we were there anyway). And out of the cut out there were a pair of 25mm tails and a 16mm green and yellow, nothing that unusual there. But the other end of the green and yellow was left hanging in mid air, and the tails were both about 100mm long with choc blocks on the end connecting them to a piece of 1mm flex with a 13amp plug on the end, no meter anywhere.
We believe that the plug was then plugged into a double socket which then supplied a ccu via a piece of twin and earth, which supplied the barn with lights and power.
Were still not sure how this caused the fault or how long it had been there like it, but we put the fault down to earth potential as once removed the fault was gone.
No matter what the farmer must have been getting cheep electricity bills.
So i thought ideal easy job, just test to see if its the cooker or the cable between the cooker and isolator thats the cause. I knew it wasn't going to be quite as simple as soon as I got a shock off the cpc's on the cooker circuit with the mcb locked off.
To cut a long story short there were three ccu each feed on its own cable from the supply, but after testing at every possible place and a lot of running around it became apparent that the fault was not caused by any part of the installation, but by 80v entering the installation on the main earthing conductor.
So I called out western power distribution and after they inspected everything on the supply they said they could find no problems. We were starting to scratch our heads, until one of them spotted further down their line a rather interesting supply.
Basically in one of the old barns that was still used as a barn there was the distributor's supply cable going in to their cut out as usual, with no fuse in the cut out (well not during the time we were there anyway). And out of the cut out there were a pair of 25mm tails and a 16mm green and yellow, nothing that unusual there. But the other end of the green and yellow was left hanging in mid air, and the tails were both about 100mm long with choc blocks on the end connecting them to a piece of 1mm flex with a 13amp plug on the end, no meter anywhere.
We believe that the plug was then plugged into a double socket which then supplied a ccu via a piece of twin and earth, which supplied the barn with lights and power.
Were still not sure how this caused the fault or how long it had been there like it, but we put the fault down to earth potential as once removed the fault was gone.
No matter what the farmer must have been getting cheep electricity bills.
