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Discuss Insulation test L to E long length of SWA in the Electrical Testing & PAT Testing Forum area at ElectriciansForums.net
To be fair to Westy it wasn't adopted until 1873 which is probably after he went to college.View attachment 113647
Hate to say it Westward, but mega Ohm is the correct way of defining it.
No tripping when sub main switched off as that was only briefly while testing .Is that with whatever's at the far end switched off?
If it randomly trips with the load-end of the SWA isolated then it confirm the IR results that the cable is damaged somewhere.I should also say that this swa cable has a 63a mcb at the front end and is randomly tripping ?
You say it is about 100m long, walk the route if you know it and look for possible disturbances, like cultivated ground, new fence posts etc. A common method of localising is to dig down half way and cut and test the cable. Then repeat until the fault is located. But be careful to make sure that you cut the correct cable. You have to risk assess, are there other cables in the area? Can they be isolated while you cut? It just a matter of patience and thinking. I know some people on here don't like the idea of joints, but done correctly they should be as good as the cable. I come from a DNO background and have used this method many times.Underground and laid about 20 plus years ago.
100% agree that if you can find the damage it is not too difficult to fit proper resin joints and they are good for decades underground.I know some people on here don't like the idea of joints, but done correctly they should be as good as the cable.
That'll be Meg ohm then
I had a college teacher who said mega ohms I cringed every time he said it.
^^ This is the bottom line.There are techniques to help locate where along the cable a fault it, but some depend on it being a low and stable short (so you can see the relative resistance to a fault from the cable ends to guess approximately the ratio of cable to it), and others require expensive time-domain reflection sort of equipment (to look at the waves bouncing around just after it clears a fault). Has there been any civil works, digging of gardens, etc, recently? That might point to a likely location.
Thanks for the info.If it randomly trips with the load-end of the SWA isolated then it confirm the IR results that the cable is damaged somewhere.
Most likely you see your 0.7 M ohm result after it has gone "Bang!" internally and you go to test it, then after time water creeps back in and it goes bang once more, etc.
There are techniques to help locate where along the cable a fault it, but some depend on it being a low and stable short (so you can see the relative resistance to a fault from the cable ends to guess approximately the ratio of cable to it), and others require expensive time-domain reflection sort of equipment (to look at the waves bouncing around just after it clears a fault). Has there been any civil works, digging of gardens, etc, recently? That might point to a likely location.
But it could just be poorly installed cable without sand/fine gravel around the cable resulting in a stone crushing it over time.
Good point but it is so random it may not trip untill next tenant in anyway. Tommorow is my window to test and confirm cable or not.If the tenant is moving out, there shouldn't be any large loads at the lodge end (electric heating off?), so if the MCB trips then, it's likely to be the cable.
Thanks for thatYou can potentially narrow this down with some calculation - by using a normal resistance test you should in theory get a different reading from each end of the cable (well, unless the damage is half way..) at which point you can look up the Ω/m for that csa of cable and if you take the cpc as a constant datum then you can get a gauge for where to start looking to dig. A couple of hours worth of head scratching with a calculator and a torpedo repair sounds a lot less painful than a total replacement. That said, the whole thing might be f'd if water has crept through all of it, but it's worth the go.
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