Electricity keeps tripping (1 yr old house)

lynzpower

hang on a minute. If you have a one year old house then you should be covered under the NHBC guarantee.

The quality of any electrical work has to be completed by a qualified engineer. It shouldnt have to come down to you to sort out and diagnose the problem

Once they have been out to look over and fix it, if it hasnt been successful, get an engineer to appraise adn do a report on whats not beendone. then you can take the builders of the property to court. You could look at steps to go for compo, personally I would be extrememly unhappy with dodgy electrics, and they should compensate me for this. Im not a litagous person far from it, but electricity scares me to death :eek:

Marsh_Samphire

Thanks lynzpower, the electrician was sent by the builders and is qualified (NICEIC I think it is). I asked for advice on here so I could get an idea of what might be wrong so I would know if they tried to fob us off, I'm very suspicious. I probably should have asked for compensation when we had no heating for 8 weeks last year though!

coolagarry

Just another approach on your problem. I live in an older house but had an 'old type' electrician change the consumer unit a couple of years ago to one which incorporated rcd's.
He strongly recommended that we did not have the fridge, washing machine etc attached to the rcd side of the unit because he said that if they went faulty they would blow a fuse and unlike movable things like electric kettles, lawn mowers etc they were unlikely to become faulty with someone holding them.
He said that he always suggested this because of the large number of 'trips' they tended to cause for no good reason.

I appreciate that some may think this defeats the purpose fo having rcd's but it works for me

bunking_off

May be completely up the wrong tree, but we had issues with our new build where the RCD was tripping quite a bit, also that the lights would flicker when appliances cycled on/off (particularly the heating).

After a lot of tracing, it was finally fixed by replacing the whole consumer unit. Apparently the RCDs themselves are only rated to be tripped a certain number of times, after which they can get a bit flakey. If, like our's, your property had a few issues to start off with (e.g. we had a short which burnt the wiring out in a dry-lined cavity), you can end up with a clapped out consumer unit even though it's only a few months old.

Might be garbage...only quoting what our electrician said to us and replacement did solve all the issues.

Marsh_Samphire

Thanks for that thought, bunking off, I will mention this to the electrician when they come back to change the switch for a higher rated one. Of course, it's been a week since the first visit and haven't seen them since. I think the site manager has got them all working flat out on the phase 2 houses due to complete soon, they were even on site all day Saturday, so of course we will drop off the bottom of his list!

beefster

Ask why they are replacing the rcd with a higher rated one? If there is a fault that is leaking more than 30mA but less than 100Ma it aint going to get better. I would change for another 30mA first and see if that was the problem. You should ideally have zero leakage. Ask them to test the earth leakage on each circuit with all appliances disconnected. If its all ok then one of your appliances is at fault.

Secondly they could not have tested the property thoroughly in the first place if they didnt find a screw through a cable? Unless the boiler cupboard went in afterwards? Might help mentioning on the compo claim tho?

According to some training i did ages ago........ i think i am right in saying that....... the 30mA rating is there because this is the minimum amount of shock current, across your heart, that will kill you. Hence all the regulations are based on this rating.

Our problem was caused by a fridge, which has been mentioned earlier as a problem. The compressors in fridges rely on the oil within them as insulation between the chassis and the winding. This breaks down after a while and can cause nuisance tripping, "so i am told".
If its in the middle of the night then either this or the hot water timer coming on (boiler again? change the on / off times or revert to the electric heater and see if it stops) would be my first stop. Unless you have one of those PIR lights outside plugged in to a socket of course..... water seepage into them can cause a trip when your local cat / fox walks by after dark?