Rain-Induced Electrical Faults & Lighting Circuit Breaker Tripping
Hi there, this is John Dale from GlobileNet, just relaying another customer story. A lot of customers get a bit of rain and they get these odd occasional tripping problems, which are usually significant, in that, it’s often connected to the household lights and requires a very interesting sort of solution – because how do you price something you don’t know anything about?
Budget Estimation & Circuit Breaker Fault Diagnosis
In this case, Bob asked me for a budget, so I gave him a budgetary figure, and I based that on experience, basically. I mean, most of the time, we will resolve a problem probably within an hour when it’s a circuit breaker problem. We can isolate the fault to a particular point, at least we can identify the area of fault if we can’t fix it immediately and provide a quote, right?
Cost-Effective Electrical Troubleshooting & Immediate Service
So the benefit of that is they get an immediate service. It’s not a high-cost service. We can go out there and resolve the problem and give them the opportunity to take the job further or not by providing a quote. So the benefit there is that they’re not up for a high fee. They know me generally. Bob worked with me on several occasions, and he has that comfort of knowing that I’m not going to rip him off, basically.
Electrical Fault-Finding Process & Insulation Resistance Testing (Megger Testing)
So with all these faults, there’s a certain consulting or process that we have to go through. There are some things that are obvious and some that are not. We can often find the fault without doing any particular line fault testing, you know, by disconnecting the circuit breaker and putting what we call a megohmmeter (a.k.a insulation resistance tester) that provides a 500V test on the lines.
Appliance Isolation vs Switching Off – Safety Circuit Breaker Behaviour
But typically that’s not going to be useful when it’s a device or an item attached to the line. We can solve that one by just unplugging everything, right? Because a lot of customers think switching the switch off is going to resolve the problem. Or if there was a problem on the appliance, then that switching it off would make perfect sense, I suppose, clear the fault. But that is not the case with safety circuit breakers. You actually need to disengage the appliance or connected device to all power points if it happens to be a power point circuit.
Outdoor Lighting Circuit Faults & Short Circuit Identification
And in this case though, it gets a little more complicated when it’s lights. So, Bob had a load of garden lights, right? And they were all a bit messy in that they had several sizes of wire. And you know, this is historical, they didn’t have safety circuit breakers on and they were having a tripping breaker, which meant they were getting a short circuit, basically. So to resolve that one, we had to go through all of the wall lights, take them off the wall, and open a middle light, separate the two segments, if you like, find out is it now switching on properly, and go through a process like that. We eventually found a wall light that was the problem, had blown up.
Cable Insulation Failure & Earthing Fault to Metal Fittings
Whoever had installed it didn’t really take good care to insulate it from the metal surround of the wall light, and ultimately over time the cable had just shorted to the metal. So then of course we have the issue of, do we tell the customer that we need to do more work? Because in this case there was no safety circuit breaker.
Compliance with Australian Wiring Rules (AS/NZS 3000) & Legacy Installations
Now the Australian Wiring Rules (AS/NZS 3000:2018 Standard) have a bit of a grandfather clause that says if the wiring was done before the changing of the rules then you can leave it as it was, as long as it’s really a similar device that’s being put in the place and there’s no wiring changes, unless there’s a specific requirement for an upgrade.
Safety Circuit Breaker (RCBO) Upgrade Recommendations & Risk Mitigation
Now, in Bob’s case, we did recommend, of course, and we do recommend generally in that case to put a safety circuit breaker in. And the problem sometimes is that putting a safety circuit breaker in highlights some of the problems that they might have on lighting circuits or power circuits for that matter. So it can lead to more expense.
Customer Approval, Electrical Upgrade & Long-Term Fault Resolution
So, but we would recommend it and identify that there could be problems by putting it in there, and give them a quote accordingly. So Bob did accept that quote, by the way, and we didn’t have any further problems. So if you’d like to engage with somebody that’s interested in your outcomes and provide a consultative approach, then please give us a call. Thank you.
