Help please!! Problem when shower is turned on and lights flicker

[Stuart McNeice]

Hi,
Im having a bit of a problem with a job i recently went to look at for a friend. The problem was that when the shower was turned on the lights through out the house started to flicker. The shower is also very old and im nt sure what kW the shower is or the cable size due to only having a quick glance at the job. The house is an old house with an old consumer board with mem memera fuse carriers. i would not have an awfull lot of experience with this old boards but im assuming 1st off the shower is drawing to much power, and being so old also has no rcd protection. Is there anyone with any advice as to what could be the problem?

 

[Guest123]

Possibly a loose neutral connection at the feed/load side of the main switch??Excessive volt drop on both the suppliers & consumers installations??Back you go and do some more inspecting & testing.

 

[haj]

I would get back there soon sounds like a loose connection in the board may well overheat and melt ect !!

 

[markharris]

I had a similar problem the other day, wnet to a customer where every time the kettle would boill the lights throughout the house would dim, turn the kettle off and theyd come back to full brightness, the customer also said it took something ridiculous like 15 minutes for the kettle (new) to boil the water.
Lights were on unprotected side of board and ring main was on RCD side.
I checked the CU for loose connections, especially either side of the incomer, and there was nothing wrong there, so I'm now thinking supply fault. Tested between L & N at the top of the incomer, as the tails were coming from the supply fuse straight to the CU, and got 196V,L to E was 235V, and N TO E
was 135V.
Rung up Western Power, they came out two hours later and opened up the Supply Head, which was an old metal thing I'd never seen before, and out spewed bits of casing and bits of supply fuse.

 

[SirKit Breaker]

The first place i visit for unusual faults is the CU, and run over all the connections to make sure they are all tight, no corrosion or damp, and with the odd exception i can usually get at least half a turn on everyone. It is amazing the problems bad connections can cause.

Cheers...........Howard

 

[MarkieSparkie]

A point for apprentices and new sparks always match the screwdriver tip size to the screw-head. I find they often use their favourite (only?) screwdriver, which is under-size for main switch/RCD incomer terminal screws. Often when checking work I can get up to 2 turns on such screws with the correct driver.