magic neutral?

[panny300]

knowing i have a bit of knowledge on house electrics, a mate asked me to have a look at his upstairs lights which had gone out.his fuse (rewirable wylex) was ok,so took a light down and found his neutrals were live,took fuse out and checked connections at rest of lights,found nothing out of ordinary,tightened all connections.. so put fuse back,his lights worked.
few days ago same thing happened,neutrals live again,this time no luck so told him to get pro in.
mate called me to go back round, leccy was there, they had the consumer unit apart,the only fuse in was to the upstairs lights with the live connected,,the neutral bar was completely empty, upstairs lights were all burning brightly,i thought the leccy was going to explain how this was happening.he then took the main neutral tail out of the main switch.so now no neutral feeding the consumer unit at all, The upstairs light were still on.
normal semi house, only this one consumer with no other connections on the tails, loft was full of junk so leccy going back when emptied.
anyone any ideas apart from nicked neutral from next door.

 

[sparkydude]

neutral to earth fault on cable, wiring of house is connected to a PME system, remove all the neutrals and the circuit will be using the earth as a return path. Sounds like his sparky did not know what he was doing as fault finding could quite easily be done from the lighting points and would certainly not involve ripping the whole fuseboard apart .

Nick

 

[Lectrician]

Neutral to earth short somewhere.

 

[sparkydude]

great minds think alike LoL

 

[RF Lighting]

Sounds like a bit of a poor sparky if he didn't work out a N-E fault having dropped the neutral out

 

[ricicle]

Sounds like sparky from down the pub was in.

 

[panny300]

thanks for the replys, my curiosity juices are flowing, where is the most likely area for this fault?mate says he has'nt done any diy or anything to cause it.

 

[pcboffinuk]

Panny,

Could be a number of things, but assuming noones tapped a nail into a wall recently the most likely, in no particular order are:

Rodent nibbling a cable somewhere (mice in the loft?)

Heat damage to a cable where it runs too close to a heat source such as down lighter or boiler

Cable degradation due to age (unlikely unless the cable is VIR or particularly old).

Probably several others I can't think of at this time of night too.

The way to track it will be to do insulation resistance tests and break down the circuit until the offending section is found and then replaced.

Gavin

 

[panny300]

thanks pcboff,

 

[THRIPSTER]

How about - the feed to the lights is coming from next door?

 

[securespark]

anyone any ideas apart from nicked neutral from next door.

 

[Nige F]

How about - the feed to the lights is coming from next door?

If you live next door to The Dingles (Emmerdale)