Hello all, new to the forum, go easy on me!
Wondered if if anybody has had a similar problem with garden spike lights, gu10, namely Knightsbridge.
A lady asked me to look at her garden lights which intermittently trip the Rcd...
From stripping it down to perform visual inspection for ingress of water, Here is what the install consists of.
4mm 3 core swa feeding a wise box in the shed, out of the wise box comes a 4 core 1.5mm (2 lives, N,E)
lives feed Wiska boxes, only 4 of them. Out Of the wiskas are a few spike lights with aurora LED lamps.
The second live feeds a water feature.
as soon as I turned the water feature on it tripped the Rcd. Disconnected the pump, performed insulation resistance on the pump (1m flex to it) and got 0.20 ohms at 500v... Initial reactions are, it's the pump.
The lights came on fine, but I thought I would test them too just to make sure. Each fitting is a simple 2m flex, removed the lamps, and put 500v through them, live to earth and neutral to earth similar readings of 0.02 ohms! She tells me they are 2 years old. There is zero evidence of any damage to the cables, and it's all of the fittings that are showing a reading like this.. Lights performed fine, very strange, but tripped again after about an hours buildup...
Therefore i have 2 questions :
1, why the hell would such a low reading not trip an Rcd straight away, and give itself an hour to do so,
2, could the flex really be that porous? It's obviously coming across to me that the flex is just sucking up water as I say, visually there is no damage but the 2m of flex is giving me a 0.02 ohms reading..
any help?
kind regards
tom
Wondered if if anybody has had a similar problem with garden spike lights, gu10, namely Knightsbridge.
A lady asked me to look at her garden lights which intermittently trip the Rcd...
From stripping it down to perform visual inspection for ingress of water, Here is what the install consists of.
4mm 3 core swa feeding a wise box in the shed, out of the wise box comes a 4 core 1.5mm (2 lives, N,E)
lives feed Wiska boxes, only 4 of them. Out Of the wiskas are a few spike lights with aurora LED lamps.
The second live feeds a water feature.
as soon as I turned the water feature on it tripped the Rcd. Disconnected the pump, performed insulation resistance on the pump (1m flex to it) and got 0.20 ohms at 500v... Initial reactions are, it's the pump.
The lights came on fine, but I thought I would test them too just to make sure. Each fitting is a simple 2m flex, removed the lamps, and put 500v through them, live to earth and neutral to earth similar readings of 0.02 ohms! She tells me they are 2 years old. There is zero evidence of any damage to the cables, and it's all of the fittings that are showing a reading like this.. Lights performed fine, very strange, but tripped again after about an hours buildup...
Therefore i have 2 questions :
1, why the hell would such a low reading not trip an Rcd straight away, and give itself an hour to do so,
2, could the flex really be that porous? It's obviously coming across to me that the flex is just sucking up water as I say, visually there is no damage but the 2m of flex is giving me a 0.02 ohms reading..
any help?
kind regards
tom