upstairs lights all not working

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BillyfromConsett

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Hi All

We've had a power surge caused by lightning. It tripped the downstairs ring sockets MCB and also busted some of the kit connected to two downstairs sockets (sky Q box, xbox, router, AV amplifier) as well as the phone point. The problem it's left us with is no upstairs lights.

I've checked the lighting MCB in the consumer unit which didn't trip, and it works if used with the downstairs light circuit. It's got 240v coming out of it. There's 240v in the upstairs circuit, but not from live to neutral. That circuit measures nil volts. It's 240v from neutral to earth though! Any ideas what's happened to our upstairs lights circuit? Nothing trips in the consumer unit and all the MCB's are set to on. I don't know how the neutral wiring goes from the upstairs lights to the main neutral to the grid. Something shorted somewhere? a neutral wire came disconnected after the lightning?

Thanks for any advice

 
"240V neutral to earth" suggests you have an open circuit neutral.   Best get an electrician to check it out. The damage to the house wiring may be more severe than you think.

In a lighting circuit, the neutral will connect from the consumer unit to each light fitting. There are several ways to wire lighting so the neutral connections may all be at the light fittings, may all be in the back box behind the light switches, or may all be in a big junction box somewhere, or even a mixture of those methods.

At this point I would be concerned the lightning strike was closer than you thought and may have burned out a lighting neutral wire somewhere, hence wanting a bit more of a thorough check while finding the actual fault.

 
probably a dodngy neutral. tbh, as above, i think you should get it checked by someone competent, there could be damage to wiring and potentially cause a fire

 
I've worked on a lightning struck house, it does very strange things. Turn off the upstairs lighting cct and get a full inspection ASAP of all the ccts. 

 
Call your insurance tell them that as a matter of heath and safety you are going to instruct an electrician of your choosing, as long as that electrician is registered scam member then they usually agree. 

 
Thank you all for the above replies. I'm getting a domestic electrician to come and assess the fault. The insurance company are fine with that. 

 
The problem has been fixed. It took the electrician about 30 minutes to find and repair the problem.

Not sure how the lightning played a part in this, but the issue was because two wires had became connected at one of the upstairs lights, between the ceiling and the bulb. No work had been done in that room for years.

I only need to get an Xbox One X and a Sony STR-DN1080 repaired now and I'm sorted.

My gratitude to all who posted. Many thanks!

 
lightining does weird stuff, my friends house got struck on the chimney pot, the energy ran down the plastering beads in the wall, melted little patches of nylon carpet adjacent to the beads in the attic conversion, but only trashed 1 short section of cable on the attic lighting circuit - I was expecting far worse!

The other time I encountered a lighting strike was to overhead poles outside the house. It only affected 1 house in the small cul-de-sac, whose board melted. Changed the board and all good, nothing wrong with the ccts themselves. 

 
I've known two occurrences. A workmate had a bungalow hit and it destroyed virtually all the electrics in the house, wires burned out of the plaster, etc and appliances wrecked, plus brickwork damaged at the hit point. 

The other instance was my wife's workplace, where the strike took the chimney pot off the next door pub.  It took out all the telephones and the alarm system, but no further electrical harm. (Though I don't know how the pub fared) .  The worst thing was that I had spent the previous Sunday voluntarily repairing and re-commissioning  that alarm, then got dragged out again because the outside siren wouldn't stop!

 
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