Solar panels Tripping RCD when it rains

Pincher

The consumer unit is supposed to trip, for your safety, but the default setup seems to put everything under RCDs.


If you are on holiday, and the RCD trips, does the power failure mean:


1. NO central heating, and your pipes freeze and burst.


2. Freezer fails, and your food spoils.


3. Alarm system battery drains out, so no alarm when burglar calls.


4. Door bell transformer has no power, so you don't know there are callers, even though you are in the house.


You can't design the set up based on nothing ever trips.
You have to design things so that the system carries on, but the short is isolated.


I am so glad I have a sub-consumer unit for the kitchen and central heating system. A water leak tripped the RCD for the house ring main and lighting circuit. I was away, but the central heating carried on working, and so did the fridge/freezer.


An electrical engineer once said to me, if you can afford it, don't have RCDs, just have separate RCBOs for everything.

EricMears

Pincher wrote: »

The consumer unit is supposed to trip, for your safety, but the default setup seems to put everything under RCDs.

If you are on holiday, and the RCD trips, does the power failure mean:

Yes ! All of them


UNLESS you pay a little more (usually about a tenner extra) and get a split load CU. You can usually choose exactly how many outlets are RCD protected and how many are not.

Can be a slight problem retro-fitting. If (say) the freezer and the sockets in kiddies' bedrooms are on same circuit you'd have to choose between safeguarding your frozen food or risking a kid's life ! that particular example is a no-brainer of course but there are subtler choices to be made. In practice you'd probably need to do some rewiring to avoid such conflicts (but that will add rather more than my £10 estimate)

lstar337

EricMears wrote: »

If (say) the freezer and the sockets in kiddies' bedrooms are on same circuit you'd have to choose between safeguarding your frozen food or risking a kid's life ! that particular example is a no-brainer of course

Yeah I hate food waste too.

dlm

I'd never have solar after hearing the fire service stance on homes with them fitted, but you should get onto the installer - after all if you have the usual doorstep deal - your roof belongs to them now, and they should maintain their equipment and not you find solutions and maintain it for them.

zeupater

dlm wrote: »

I'd never have solar after hearing the fire service stance on homes with them fitted, but you should get onto the installer - after all if you have the usual doorstep deal - your roof belongs to them now, and they should maintain their equipment and not you find solutions and maintain it for them.

... :eek: .... possibly a good idea to do a little more background reading & research before chipping in with the above ...

HTH
Z