Hello all, haven't posted for a while.
Got asked to find out why a lighting circuit kept tripping in a house. Traced the fault to the switched line to the light switch in the front room. The house owner was heading off to France, so I isolated the cable and then I would come back when they returned. The house owner mentioned a strange "pop" sound every now and then...
Got a call when they came back from France that the sockets had stopped working in the same room as the lighting fault. So we traced the ring and it ended up serving the front room, the hallway, part of the Kitchen and an upstairs bedroom(above the front room). X(
Only part of the ring wasn't working in the downstairs front room, it wasn't enough to trip the breaker. I was up in the bedroom when I heard a "pop" from under the floorboards. The house owner then said they thought they had heard a noise from the same area...they then mentioned that when they got home from France they had noticed Wasps flying in and out of the air brick between the ground and first floor, right where this noise was coming from. The had the pest control in and they had sprayed wasp killer in through the air brick.
So up came the floor(Bloody chip board :yellow card ) and low and behold:
Where the Wasp nest was(after removal)
They were getting in from the air brick to the nest via the cable run in the joists
The damaged cables for both the lighting and the ring were running through this hole (a bit blurry)
We can only presume they chewed the cables to increase the hole size for access to the nest. We figured that the "pop" was possibly wasps walking across the exposed cables and electrocuting themselves.
Got asked to find out why a lighting circuit kept tripping in a house. Traced the fault to the switched line to the light switch in the front room. The house owner was heading off to France, so I isolated the cable and then I would come back when they returned. The house owner mentioned a strange "pop" sound every now and then...
Got a call when they came back from France that the sockets had stopped working in the same room as the lighting fault. So we traced the ring and it ended up serving the front room, the hallway, part of the Kitchen and an upstairs bedroom(above the front room). X(
Only part of the ring wasn't working in the downstairs front room, it wasn't enough to trip the breaker. I was up in the bedroom when I heard a "pop" from under the floorboards. The house owner then said they thought they had heard a noise from the same area...they then mentioned that when they got home from France they had noticed Wasps flying in and out of the air brick between the ground and first floor, right where this noise was coming from. The had the pest control in and they had sprayed wasp killer in through the air brick.
So up came the floor(Bloody chip board :yellow card ) and low and behold:
Where the Wasp nest was(after removal)
They were getting in from the air brick to the nest via the cable run in the joists
The damaged cables for both the lighting and the ring were running through this hole (a bit blurry)
We can only presume they chewed the cables to increase the hole size for access to the nest. We figured that the "pop" was possibly wasps walking across the exposed cables and electrocuting themselves.
