Jordan, invest in a couple of borescopes; one for you and one for your mate. They don't cost much and can make life much easier. Your first customer will pay for the scopes.
When you pass 500 volt DC through it because they are somehow connected, they are making the light live, as you said. The neutral and CPC are connected. I have worked in so many buildings that it is the third building where I found all live connected together, all Blue or neutrals and emergency lines connected together. In this case, an amazing amigo has even added CPC to it because he thought it was unfair to leave cpc lonely, ha ha ha.
50 Years as an electrical contractor. 25 Years as contractor to food industry blue chip companies Nestle etc. Obviously lots of fault finding over the years. Single & 3 ph. Now Retired over 13 years now. Great content & logic finding the silly fault. They are usually silly faults.
Top electricians are really good to watch. To know your job inside out is essential and for you to solve something others cannot must give you a great buzz, well done guys.
Yeah I don’t believe 2 electricians couldn’t find this more like the homeowner messed it up and artisan thought lovely we will make a video out of this
I started with house wiring and then moved on to industrial electrical, took a interest in industrial control installation and repair, did a lot of single loop and DDC. All the things I did was in the US and our terminology is way different than where ever your at. I really didn’t understand a lot of what you were talking about but found it very interesting.
Nice work, lads. Good to see you did not just take the first thing that was wrong, and ignore a possible whole host of other faults. Better to be sure.
Having noted the wiring was incorrectly terminated above the cupboard I am a little lost why you didn't put that right before conducting any IR testing.
All through my training and every time i turn on a completed light, EVEN THOUGH I've fully tested and KNOW it'll work I still get a woohoo moment. Great to see that even with your experience that's still the case.
The reason the lights blink when you use the insulation tester, is that the input capacitors inside the led driver are charging up until the circuit kicks into action and lights the leds. This then discharges the capacitors and the cycle repeats.
The insulation tester is like a megger tester giving 500volts which can destroy an LED lamp - they should disconnect them first as with any delicate electronics - or buy the customer a replacement if it is F***ed up !
@@pjeaton58 it probably won’t actually damage them as the rate the insulation tester charges the capacitors is slower than the rate that the get discharged when the lights blink
We always tend to think of how the circuit _should_ work, so we have to dig into how it's actually wired up since there's no telling what's wrong or in how many ways. I once was helping my nephew's friend rewire his kitchen ceiling light. He ended up with only one of the four possible settings of the two 3-way switches that would allow the light to be off. He crawled around up in the ceiling (with blown-in insulation) while I got to stay down in the room. It finally turned out there was hidden under the insulation a third cable feeding into a J-box that was sourcing power and bypassing the 3-way switching. Once we understood reality we could rework the wiring and get it functional. Thankfully that second power feed was on the same breaker/fuse as the other one feeding the switches, or it could have been dangerous.
I fixed a similar fault for a member of my family. Wall lights that would trip the whole house circuit breaker. A professional electrician had condemned the whole house (re-wired within the last twenty years) and said it all needed doing again at a quote of £5K. They couldn’t;t be bothered to fault find it, but I did and found the classic fault of the neutral return from the lighting circuit wired back into the side of the consumer unit that wasn’t on the same side as the ELCB that was being used for the live supply. The imbalance in the lighting supply fired the trip. A £5K bill avoided. I would always question an electricians diagnosis, but only because I’m an electronics engineer and 230V domestic installation is very simple in comparison.
to all DIY enthusiasts: if it comes to installaion make sure you know how to do that properly ! Even slight mistakes can lead to weired results or at least even DEATH, i`ve done enough of that stuff seeing really big faults on my own not beeing an electrician, but i managed to solve the problems bcs i had background informations - just never do things you dont understand, in that case ask a professional. Most of them help you when you show you are not an idiot.😀
Fault finding: I am now retired, but only a short while ago, I got a phone call from an Electrician friend who used to get me to do his often-time-consuming fault finding. A group of Five caravans were tripping the main box, having got it down to one particular Caravan, the newly ish qualified site Electrician was struggling to find the ever-changing insulation fault. the power would be on, lights would work, but as soon as a Kettle or Toaster was powered, the site box would trip off. I got there and soon instructed them to change the faulty RCD in the hook up for a start which should have detected the leak, and activated. But the ever-changing resistance fault remained, lights would work, but as soon as any bigger load was switched on, off the RCD would go, now only on the hook up box with the new RCD. A little old-fashioned test was to identify in reverse where this insulation problem was, rather than from the consumer unit, I tested from a convenient Kettle base to a socket. Sure enough, ever changing resistance faults across all Three conductors. Isolate the Smoke alarm feed. Caravan worked normally again. I must add that I got him to switch all the MCBs off and put them on one at a time, as soon as the Lights were engaged, (Main power off of course)! the fault appeared on the Live as well as the neutral (trust me here). The fault remained on the neutral to CPC all the time. But came up on the Live too as soon as the circuit was engaged (Warp Nine!). Looked up at the ceiling to see Two odd smoke alarms, One mains and One Battery, pulled off the Battery alarm and there was a hole in the ceiling, shone a torch up to see Three bare wire ends hiding in the damp roof insulation. A maintenance person had replaced a faulty mains alarm with a Battery version, and just shoved the wires up into the roof void. Fizzling about in the damp space just waiting to arc and trip. Had he have isolated the Smoke alarm feed; he may have found it on his own (eventually!). I advised him to make a written report to H&S demanding no Maintenace workers were to do any Electrical work, at least untill they tracked down the culprit.! Never seen it before, and don't expect to come across it again.
They keep battery ones in stock for a quick fix. Mains ones are only fitted in the factory. It's very worrying how dumb folks are allowed to get involved.
14:45 "how are you supposed to access these connections?" That top trim is held on with a couple of screws in the corners of the cupboard below. Undo those and give yourself an extra 20mm to work with.
You must be a kitchen fitter. All accessories and consumer units must be fully accessable. The operative word is " Fully" not partially. The other horrible electrical work kichen fitter do is fit sockets inside cabinets.
Troubleshooting is a skill many no longer have. I too, have come behind many electricians and plumbers and found the problem the could not find, and usually, it was simple, and sometimes they created more problems in addition to the original problem. Often I ask, what all did you touch, and often, it leads me right to the problem.
I started of life as a Norweb apprentice back in '77 and left contracting for the main business after 15 years. I do like to have a good fault finding video .... if only to remind myself what a good move I made going into E.N.W. I retired this year but was fault finding on a larger scale (underground mains faults) ...... trust me some of those can get scary ..... and weird! What has got me thinking is that someone actually wired it up not working ..... and left it like that! Not good!
There is nothing worse than trades who say they will turn up then don't, and you can't get hold of them. Why don't they just say they don't want the job?! 🤔
@@marlondaniels3114 I had a South African customer for years, he used to walk around with a parrot on his shoulder! Always had great home cooked snacks and treats. Great family and great friends in the end, very sadly they went back to South Africa to look after sick relatives, we are still in touch and I hope they come back one day.
@@markkennard861 I think you are correct! If not, he's been conned by this daft performance. I reckon there probably never was a fault and the whole thing is complete staged BS.
When ripping out a kitchen a few years ago we turned everything off except the cooker socket for power when working and stated to pull apart the kitchen then we came across some bell wire fitted to the underside of the kitchen units with drawing pins through the center of the wire thinking it was obsolete pulling the units away it went bang sparking eventually it blew the wire cooker fuse . After some digging in the plaster we followed the bell wire to just above the cooker point to find the bell wire had been wrapped and twisted around the cooker cable the insulation had been stripping off and no tape just plastered into the wall . The owner said the he had the lights under the cupboard taken off a few year before and they had left the bell wire in just tucked behind the units . I think it was the owner who had been tinkering and fitted the 240v 45amp cable to bell wire .
I had to teach a lady electrician fault finding long time ago in a factory, she qualified, brand new sparky, beautiful one at that. She was sent to fix a machine and after a hour the foreman sent me to go have a look. As she was short, the first thing I did was check a high up proximity switch and that was it, machine was fixed. When you work with short people always start at the high stuff.
I once did a fault find job for a friend of mine who ran his own specialist garage. The lighting in the workshop (contains a few car lifts) didn't work fully and it blew a rewireable fuse, so unscrewed the metal switch box and found the accessory screw fouled a live wire. Sorted that, put in a new fuse and they all worked again, apart from a few lighting tubes needing replacement. I don't work as an electrician but I went through training at college but never got a job in it. I was good at electrics at school anyway it was all logical stuff to me, as long as you put in the study and understand exactly how it works you can manipulate and control it to serve you every single time rather than kill you. It is a great feeling to fix something though.
Nice troubleshooting!! Yes some problems can be really simple!! Enjoyed the video and have subscribed! Being a retired electrician here in the states, I find the wiring methods "across the pond" interesting. Like to learn more!!
Who ever looked at it first should have spotted that ,I bet they couldn’t be bothered , it’s a case of kitchen fitters and in some cases bathroom fitters doing electrics when they shouldn’t you see it all the time and some cases it’s left in a potential life threatening state . The client was happy and pleased it was sorted out and that some one actually turned up to do the job it’s all good positive content .
Great education to learn from. Just went to customer home for a no ground situation. Hakf house grounded other half no ground. Two hiurse of troubleshooting. Two gfci are bad and no ground ran to finished basement.
It was interesting to see you use a megger for house wiring as I have never seen one used in residential before in the usa. We use meggers in aviation. Great find.
Can't say I'm surprised your electricians didn't come back tbh, these are "small" projects that can take a pretty long time to fix in a proper way and most people wouldn't be bothered to take these jobs. Seeing this job makes me happy I'm an industrial Electrician xD
No neutral with live (active) present . Thats why they flicker (caps inside the LED charge up then dump the power, thats when it flashes). Had tons of these before but it will be the LED itself. Floodlights loves doing this asspecially in a area that gets a lot of power dips or brownouts to be technical.
The light flickering during insulation resistance test is likely that the tester charges a capacitor and the discharge is the energy used to check impedance. The discharge probably injects enough energy to light the LED's momentarily. The LED's have a transformer in the fixture power supplies.
Straight away you’d do a basic visual inspection in which the chap did early doors. Long winded that but glad the lights are back working for the customer considering the hassle he went through with previous tradesmen.
The flickering lights at 10:00 could be from the built in capacitor discharging in every led lamp, since you inject some charge during testing. Cycling through it's RC-time on fixed intervals, hence flickering.
I'm an American Electrician who likes watching your videos because I'm addicted to troubleshooting and it's fascinating to me that Europe doesnt bond neutral and earth ground together at the first means of disconnect like we do in America.
They do, sometimes . It is called P.M.E or TNC-S . PEN(ground and neutral combined) splits to PE and N somewhere in main fuse head before the meter. So it is kind of the same thing.
At 5:55 you already discovered, that PE (protective earth in germany) is connected to neutral which is obviously the reason why the RCD drips (current on "line" gets split to neutral and PE -> RCD detects the difference). I don't understand why you didn't remove the connection at this point earlier...
Well that is one good thing about the USA, code requires all junction boxes to be accessible and can not be hidden. Now that doesn't say it doesn't happen, but at least if it was wired by a reliable electrician and keep up to code there wouldn't be any. 👍🤠
That kitchen job looked like butchery. Putting joins in tight, hard to access places is just causing trouble for the next person who needs to work on it. Hidden hard to find junction boxes are in my opinion, an abomination. If my father had seen something like that, he would have considered rewiring the whole light circuit on the reasoning that the idiot who originally did it could not be trusted not to have done something worse. I saw him tell an owner of a house about something comparable to this once that he found, and they had him check the wiring of the whole house. Luckily the customer already planned to have the house rewired as the cables were in poor condition due to age of the house.
Are you kidding? I guessed that fault at 0:25 and didn't bother watching the rest of the vid. Edit: but that's cos I'm a gasman the top of the trades.👍
I dont get why you was confused that the lights were flickering when you put voltage down line and cpc.. after the guy said that they had connected the neutral and cpc together in the connection plate? He found the fault within 1 minute haha
I would more likely think it's not the electrician could not fix. I have found a lot of customers don't explain things properly. Years ago, we had a customer keep coming back complaining. We finally realised what he wanted. Didn't want fixed he wanted removed. All he ever said prior was " it's not right "
His mage worked it out in 2s flat. Worth checking the rest, though. Could be any number of other problems. Sorting out the box behind the switch, fitting th grommet etc. all worthwile.
As a retired electrician and electrotechnology teacher I found it odd our electrical exam results where I worked required a pass mark of 75% and latter raised to 100% in competency based assessment. But other professions be it the doctor you trust with your life or the mechanic that works on the brakes of your car, are qualified with much lower requirements. What I would say is that there are good and bad ones, in all professions, and there are some that excel in some aspects of there professionl but are not so good elsewhere. So shop around. And yes I have more than a few tales I could tell! 😂
I don't believe for a second that they didn't instantly fix that obvious fault and test it, than realized they didn't have enough content for a video... Only difference is they aren't trying to charge the guy for there time.
The reason the insulation tester is making some lights flick on is your powering up their switch mode power supplies with your IR tester... that is charging up the power supply capacitors....then when the voltage builds up enough the circuit triggers an output..... but not enough for continuous operation.
Somewhere you have a switched neutral and ground wire. I've had this issue before with a builder who thought they knew how to do electrical work. Just a thought
4:06 Is this normal in the UK to leave those rail exposed like that? Here we have to cut them to size, so whenever you add another unti you have to replace the rail since it's now to short. Another option would be to fit the extra units and mark them as "reserve" for future expansion but that is rarely done for several reasons one being cost.
my neighbor who was a friend knocked on our door knowing that i was somekind of a electrical something or other exasperated . I had three different contracters come out and none fixed it I'm tired of throwing good money after bad results . a ground fault breaker was tripping for no reason she explained ..here the lawn sprinklers were the culprit . the solenoids were burred in the ground and the terminators were not water sealed.. GFI's were throughout the home ..kitchen tripped, solinoids were sourced from garage
I think the same builder must've done my electrics when he wired an electric water heater circuit and a 13amp double socket circuit so the wires were crossed so they actually shared the same circuits, so if you thought you were switching off either circuit at the consumer unit both were actually always on! I think one of those little beepy live wire testers might've saved my life when I was trying to figure out what he'd done! I have a proper electrician coming shortly so will be interesting to see what else he might find. 😂
Here in North America those lights would have worked fine, the current would have returned back to the panel via the ground wire, we only have GFCI/AFCI on certain circuits close to sinks in the bathroom and basement, the main feed breaker only serves as overcurrent protection.
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Jordan, invest in a couple of borescopes; one for you and one for your mate. They don't cost much and can make life much easier. Your first customer will pay for the scopes.
When you pass 500 volt DC through it because they are somehow connected, they are making the light live, as you said. The neutral and CPC are connected. I have worked in so many buildings that it is the third building where I found all live connected together, all Blue or neutrals and emergency lines connected together. In this case, an amazing amigo has even added CPC to it because he thought it was unfair to leave cpc lonely, ha ha ha.
For us blokes in the colonies define CPC & RDC.
Its strange how different wiring is there compared to the US
@@donh6416cpc circuit protective conductor
RCD is residual Current device
50 Years as an electrical contractor. 25 Years as contractor to food industry blue chip companies Nestle etc. Obviously lots of fault finding over the years. Single & 3 ph. Now Retired over 13 years now. Great content & logic finding the silly fault. They are usually silly faults.
Top electricians are really good to watch. To know your job inside out is essential and for you to solve something others cannot must give you a great buzz, well done guys.
They did find the fault at the beginning, but I think they wanted to explain the in and outs of fault finding really. So thanks for that 👏🏼
Actually painful to watch the lad find the fault and then watch his boss mess about taking lights down rather than than just fixing what he’s found.
Half of the Journey is telling the story. The "Lad" learned and, so did we...
@@roypublic3269 And the costumer pays for our enjoyment, so nice of him.
@roypublic3269 and the customer got hit with a massive bill
Yeah the boss is a shit sparky
Yikes 🤣.
the other guy literally found the fault at the start and you dragged it out lol
Yeah I don’t believe 2 electricians couldn’t find this more like the homeowner messed it up and artisan thought lovely we will make a video out of this
@@rn5666 100% he stages all these for his ego
@@rn5666 For sure! And a particularly terrible one at that!! That's a 10 minute one man job IMO. The other guy is an adult learner I assume
@Causinghoodlumhavoc why bother watching if you have that opinion?
I know right, easiest fault to find ever! LMFAO
I started with house wiring and then moved on to industrial electrical, took a interest in industrial control installation and repair, did a lot of single loop and DDC. All the things I did was in the US and our terminology is way different than where ever your at. I really didn’t understand a lot of what you were talking about but found it very interesting.
Nice work, lads. Good to see you did not just take the first thing that was wrong, and ignore a possible whole host of other faults. Better to be sure.
Having noted the wiring was incorrectly terminated above the cupboard I am a little lost why you didn't put that right before conducting any IR testing.
Because that makes for a UA-cam short, not a full video.
Looks like it was all set up to promote unlite torch to be honest . How did the homeowner know what a switch wire is ?
bc when things are that messed up its usually a good idea to check everything is safe and not just the first thing you see
@@darrengould4668 well when there is a loose wire not connected to the back of a lightswitch genius then it probably belongs to the switch
@@mitchellwilliams2060 Only if there is a place for the wire.
All through my training and every time i turn on a completed light, EVEN THOUGH I've fully tested and KNOW it'll work I still get a woohoo moment. Great to see that even with your experience that's still the case.
Job well done, and to make sure all safety devices are working properly!
I love fault finding. You have to be on top of your game to do it well, and you gentleman were up for task. Nice work and an excellent video.
Old Aussie spark here. You stumped me with CPC. We do it easy and just call it the earth!!!
Used to be the same here for many years🤦♂️
@@GrahamTurnbull-tg1hk What will they call it when they wire up some buildings on the Moon or Mars?
Day to day nearly all sparks in UK just call it the earth as well! If you want to be fancy then its the Circuit Protective Conductor - CPC.
But CPC sounds far more technical than plain old earth !!! they got to bling it up it justifies the bill
CPC is the wire, earth is what it's connected to. Yeah, I know.
The reason the lights blink when you use the insulation tester, is that the input capacitors inside the led driver are charging up until the circuit kicks into action and lights the leds. This then discharges the capacitors and the cycle repeats.
Or because the neutral and cpc were reversed, as the supply cpc was connected to the lights neutral in the connection unit
The insulation tester is like a megger tester giving 500volts which can
destroy an LED lamp - they should disconnect them first as with any delicate
electronics - or buy the customer a replacement if it is F***ed up !
@@pjeaton58 it probably won’t actually damage them as the rate the insulation tester charges the capacitors is slower than the rate that the get discharged when the lights blink
@@pjeaton58he was using 250V DC IR
We always tend to think of how the circuit _should_ work, so we have to dig into how it's actually wired up since there's no telling what's wrong or in how many ways.
I once was helping my nephew's friend rewire his kitchen ceiling light. He ended up with only one of the four possible settings of the two 3-way switches that would allow the light to be off. He crawled around up in the ceiling (with blown-in insulation) while I got to stay down in the room. It finally turned out there was hidden under the insulation a third cable feeding into a J-box that was sourcing power and bypassing the 3-way switching. Once we understood reality we could rework the wiring and get it functional. Thankfully that second power feed was on the same breaker/fuse as the other one feeding the switches, or it could have been dangerous.
This is fascinating. Watching people who actually know their field problem solve is super interesting.
I fixed a similar fault for a member of my family. Wall lights that would trip the whole house circuit breaker. A professional electrician had condemned the whole house (re-wired within the last twenty years) and said it all needed doing again at a quote of £5K. They couldn’t;t be bothered to fault find it, but I did and found the classic fault of the neutral return from the lighting circuit wired back into the side of the consumer unit that wasn’t on the same side as the ELCB that was being used for the live supply. The imbalance in the lighting supply fired the trip. A £5K bill avoided. I would always question an electricians diagnosis, but only because I’m an electronics engineer and 230V domestic installation is very simple in comparison.
ah... the usual "I'm stumped might as well rip it all and redo, and charge more" BS
Wow your great 😂
to all DIY enthusiasts: if it comes to installaion make sure you know how to do that properly ! Even slight mistakes can lead to weired results or at least even DEATH, i`ve done enough of that stuff seeing really big faults on my own not beeing an electrician, but i managed to solve the problems bcs i had background informations - just never do things you dont understand, in that case ask a professional. Most of them help you when you show you are not an idiot.😀
Tom found the fault after 6 minutes… Why would you IR test after that with the CPC and neutral still connected together???
Just to waste our time to?
He was stating the obvious
@@ricvandervyver2461 if you think this is time wasting - why don´t you just stop watching and do something productive instead?
Fault finding:
I am now retired, but only a short while ago, I got a phone call from an Electrician friend who used to get me to do his often-time-consuming fault finding.
A group of Five caravans were tripping the main box, having got it down to one particular Caravan, the newly ish qualified site Electrician was struggling to find the ever-changing insulation fault. the power would be on, lights would work, but as soon as a Kettle or Toaster was powered, the site box would trip off.
I got there and soon instructed them to change the faulty RCD in the hook up for a start which should have detected the leak, and activated.
But the ever-changing resistance fault remained, lights would work, but as soon as any bigger load was switched on, off the RCD would go, now only on the hook up box with the new RCD.
A little old-fashioned test was to identify in reverse where this insulation problem was, rather than from the consumer unit, I tested from a convenient Kettle base to a socket.
Sure enough, ever changing resistance faults across all Three conductors. Isolate the Smoke alarm feed. Caravan worked normally again.
I must add that I got him to switch all the MCBs off and put them on one at a time, as soon as the Lights were engaged, (Main power off of course)! the fault appeared on the Live as well as the neutral (trust me here). The fault remained on the neutral to CPC all the time. But came up on the Live too as soon as the circuit was engaged (Warp Nine!).
Looked up at the ceiling to see Two odd smoke alarms, One mains and One Battery, pulled off the Battery alarm and there was a hole in the ceiling, shone a torch up to see Three bare wire ends hiding in the damp roof insulation.
A maintenance person had replaced a faulty mains alarm with a Battery version, and just shoved the wires up into the roof void. Fizzling about in the damp space just waiting to arc and trip.
Had he have isolated the Smoke alarm feed; he may have found it on his own (eventually!).
I advised him to make a written report to H&S demanding no Maintenace workers were to do any Electrical work, at least untill they tracked down the culprit.!
Never seen it before, and don't expect to come across it again.
That one is a world's classic 😂 "lets just shove the old wires in there"
You generally find if the IR hunts about randomly, moisture is involved somewhere.
I have seen that done in houses, why would you replace a mains powered smoke detector for a battery?
@@graememcculloch3455 Because battery ones are a quid.
They keep battery ones in stock for a quick fix.
Mains ones are only fitted in the factory.
It's very worrying how dumb folks are allowed to get involved.
Please tell us you didn’t leave those exposed terminals above the kitchen units.
Yeah, if some sticks a hand in there it's not gonna end well for them.
14:45 "how are you supposed to access these connections?"
That top trim is held on with a couple of screws in the corners of the cupboard below. Undo those and give yourself an extra 20mm to work with.
Oooh nice tip 👍
You must be a kitchen fitter.
All accessories and consumer units must be fully accessable. The operative word is " Fully" not partially. The other horrible electrical work kichen fitter do is fit sockets inside cabinets.
@aadd3538 hahahaha I'm just a homeowner with a screwdriver and a pair of eyes mate 😄
Troubleshooting is a skill many no longer have. I too, have come behind many electricians and plumbers and found the problem the could not find, and usually, it was simple, and sometimes they created more problems in addition to the original problem. Often I ask, what all did you touch, and often, it leads me right to the problem.
I started of life as a Norweb apprentice back in '77 and left contracting for the main business after 15 years. I do like to have a good fault finding video .... if only to remind myself what a good move I made going into E.N.W.
I retired this year but was fault finding on a larger scale (underground mains faults) ...... trust me some of those can get scary ..... and weird!
What has got me thinking is that someone actually wired it up not working ..... and left it like that! Not good!
Excellent another video of Jordan making a smug meal out of what should be a simple and quick fault fix
There is nothing worse than trades who say they will turn up then don't, and you can't get hold of them. Why don't they just say they don't want the job?! 🤔
Lots of worse things . Check yourself before it is too late
What an wholesome and friendly customer !
Sounds South African. We're a fantastic bunch...
He's getting paid .. :)
@@marlondaniels3114 I had a South African customer for years, he used to walk around with a parrot on his shoulder! Always had great home cooked snacks and treats. Great family and great friends in the end, very sadly they went back to South Africa to look after sick relatives, we are still in touch and I hope they come back one day.
Yh, hes a saffa, that's why
@@markkennard861 I think you are correct! If not, he's been conned by this daft performance. I reckon there probably never was a fault and the whole thing is complete staged BS.
When ripping out a kitchen a few years ago we turned everything off except the cooker socket for power when working and stated to pull apart the kitchen then we came across some bell wire fitted to the underside of the kitchen units with drawing pins through the center of the wire thinking it was obsolete pulling the units away it went bang sparking eventually it blew the wire cooker fuse .
After some digging in the plaster we followed the bell wire to just above the cooker point to find the bell wire had been wrapped and twisted around the cooker cable the insulation had been stripping off and no tape just plastered into the wall .
The owner said the he had the lights under the cupboard taken off a few year before and they had left the bell wire in just tucked behind the units .
I think it was the owner who had been tinkering and fitted the 240v 45amp cable to bell wire .
Top guys, great to see tradesman knowing their job, great job and well done
Well done. Nice thorough fault finding.
erm, did you sort the exposed live parts above the cupboard ? 🤔🤔🤔
dragged that one out! the fault couldn't have been more on show!
thats just 5k please
I had to teach a lady electrician fault finding long time ago in a factory, she qualified, brand new sparky, beautiful one at that. She was sent to fix a machine and after a hour the foreman sent me to go have a look. As she was short, the first thing I did was check a high up proximity switch and that was it, machine was fixed. When you work with short people always start at the high stuff.
I once did a fault find job for a friend of mine who ran his own specialist garage. The lighting in the workshop (contains a few car lifts) didn't work fully and it blew a rewireable fuse, so unscrewed the metal switch box and found the accessory screw fouled a live wire. Sorted that, put in a new fuse and they all worked again, apart from a few lighting tubes needing replacement. I don't work as an electrician but I went through training at college but never got a job in it. I was good at electrics at school anyway it was all logical stuff to me, as long as you put in the study and understand exactly how it works you can manipulate and control it to serve you every single time rather than kill you. It is a great feeling to fix something though.
Who found the fault Jordan? when you said we, it was actually Tom who spotted it. So Tom should have the glory of the day.
Definitely 🙌
Nice troubleshooting!! Yes some problems can be really simple!! Enjoyed the video and have subscribed! Being a retired electrician here in the states, I find the wiring methods "across the pond" interesting. Like to learn more!!
Who ever looked at it first should have spotted that ,I bet they couldn’t be bothered , it’s a case of kitchen fitters and in some cases bathroom fitters doing electrics when they shouldn’t you see it all the time and some cases it’s left in a potential life threatening state .
The client was happy and pleased it was sorted out and that some one actually turned up to do the job it’s all good positive content .
0:25 neutral fault. You dont need watch the rest.
I think he has edited it after you commented, as 0:25 now seems to be him knocking on the door
@awt nope when other sparkies can't find it it's usually a neutral fault.
Awesome video. Had similar issue with garage light where in the wall socket a neutral and live wire were connected wrong way around.
Absolutely brilliant tradesmen.
I hope you tidied the wiring above the cupboards it looked shocking!
Ha ha it look shocking 😄
Looked and felt 😂
Get yourself a ferret camera !! Best thing I ever bought, you can attach it to your rods too. Makes it easier to inspect and what not
Fault finding is my life, I love a good fault!!! Top job, cannot believe it was so simple!!
You and me both!
How did you make that into a video 😂 could have sorted that on my own in 5 minutes
Hello to my fellow South African living in the uk 😊
Yeah, worth testing even though I knew I was that when you shown it, kitchen fitters do make our lives exciting
Well done guys
Great education to learn from. Just went to customer home for a no ground situation. Hakf house grounded other half no ground. Two hiurse of troubleshooting. Two gfci are bad and no ground ran to finished basement.
It was interesting to see you use a megger for house wiring as I have never seen one used in residential before in the usa. We use meggers in aviation. Great find.
Owner has 100% been playing around with it 😂😂
Can't say I'm surprised your electricians didn't come back tbh, these are "small" projects that can take a pretty long time to fix in a proper way and most people wouldn't be bothered to take these jobs.
Seeing this job makes me happy I'm an industrial Electrician xD
No neutral with live (active) present . Thats why they flicker (caps inside the LED charge up then dump the power, thats when it flashes). Had tons of these before but it will be the LED itself. Floodlights loves doing this asspecially in a area that gets a lot of power dips or brownouts to be technical.
The light flickering during insulation resistance test is likely that the tester charges a capacitor and the discharge is the energy used to check impedance. The discharge probably injects enough energy to light the LED's momentarily. The LED's have a transformer in the fixture power supplies.
Your sparks found the issue after 2 minutes so why was you still fannying around dropping lights etc
I love fannying about
Were 😉
Well found, what did you do to make those connections above the units safe?
They are wall connection plates that had been removed from the wall by previous electrician. So all they had to do was refit them into wall.
@@rodd8170broken ones.
Hello from France. Next tool : endoscope ? Very usefull in this situation. Waiting for the next video. Best regards.
Straight away you’d do a basic visual inspection in which the chap did early doors. Long winded that but glad the lights are back working for the customer considering the hassle he went through with previous tradesmen.
The flickering lights at 10:00 could be from the built in capacitor discharging in every led lamp, since you inject some charge during testing. Cycling through it's RC-time on fixed intervals, hence flickering.
I'm an American Electrician who likes watching your videos because I'm addicted to troubleshooting and it's fascinating to me that Europe doesnt bond neutral and earth ground together at the first means of disconnect like we do in America.
Yeah it’s a confusing world 😂
They do, sometimes . It is called P.M.E or TNC-S . PEN(ground and neutral combined) splits to PE and N somewhere in main fuse head before the meter. So it is kind of the same thing.
At 5:55 you already discovered, that PE (protective earth in germany) is connected to neutral which is obviously the reason why the RCD drips (current on "line" gets split to neutral and PE -> RCD detects the difference). I don't understand why you didn't remove the connection at this point earlier...
I liked the part where the guy was miced up before they'd "first met"😂😂😂
Well that is one good thing about the USA, code requires all junction boxes to be accessible and can not be hidden. Now that doesn't say it doesn't happen, but at least if it was wired by a reliable electrician and keep up to code there wouldn't be any. 👍🤠
BS7671 says exactly the same thing, but your average UK "sparkies" are useless. They just don't know it...
Correct bs 7671 states all JBs are accessible not buried in the wall but it was obvious where the fault was but you just milked it to charge more
You have to wonder what sort of plum would miss the neutral in the earth terminal. They're different colours for a reason..
It is shocking that somehow, TWO electricians missed this...
@@artisanelectrics Makes you wonder what other gaffs those 2 electricians are making. Good job finding the fault though, very rewarding.
That kitchen job looked like butchery. Putting joins in tight, hard to access places is just causing trouble for the next person who needs to work on it. Hidden hard to find junction boxes are in my opinion, an abomination. If my father had seen something like that, he would have considered rewiring the whole light circuit on the reasoning that the idiot who originally did it could not be trusted not to have done something worse. I saw him tell an owner of a house about something comparable to this once that he found, and they had him check the wiring of the whole house. Luckily the customer already planned to have the house rewired as the cables were in poor condition due to age of the house.
Are you kidding? I guessed that fault at 0:25 and didn't bother watching the rest of the vid.
Edit: but that's cos I'm a gasman the top of the trades.👍
@@artisanelectrics you missed It until the other lad gave you a nudge to look at the picture again.........
I'm from New Zealand brother gotta say impressive
10 grand fault finding
I dont get why you was confused that the lights were flickering when you put voltage down line and cpc.. after the guy said that they had connected the neutral and cpc together in the connection plate? He found the fault within 1 minute haha
Embarrassing
Nice of claudio to wear that lavelier mic when he answered the door.
@@gavbag1234 and to cover his door number before Jordan turned up to film.
@@NealMcQuade 😂😂 Makes the fault finding that bit harder. You don't even know the fault's address.
I stumbled across your content..Enjoyed video so I've subscribed and look forward to having a look through playlist 👍.. Thanks
Nice one Jordan! 👍🏽
Interesting. More fault finding vids if you please.
Surprised you didn't have a borescope to look up into the ceiling void. 🤨
I would more likely think it's not the electrician could not fix. I have found a lot of customers don't explain things properly.
Years ago, we had a customer keep coming back complaining.
We finally realised what he wanted.
Didn't want fixed he wanted removed. All he ever said prior was " it's not right "
I love the tiny pause each time our hero realises that he's on camera and so can't say
'The reason why the switch is fff .. failing.'
Smacks forehead! Taking the bulb up out to make it way easier to pull down the downlight. Wow. Worth the price of admission alone 😜
Easy fault find, looks like you made a meal out of that one 😂
His mage worked it out in 2s flat. Worth checking the rest, though. Could be any number of other problems. Sorting out the box behind the switch, fitting th grommet etc. all worthwile.
Justifying that hourly rate 😂 why wouldn’t fixing that neutral connection be the first thing you do? In and out in 30 mins
Great job guys!
How do you guys go in the UK using the light blue neutral as an active without needing to sleeve it?
Tom's really nice and seems smart.
Get yourself a tone tester . Makes finding cable routes and junction boxes super easy
interesting. Which model do you recommend and is there a video explanation for learning, pre purchase?
As a retired electrician and electrotechnology teacher I found it odd our electrical exam results where I worked required a pass mark of 75% and latter raised to 100% in competency based assessment.
But other professions be it the doctor you trust with your life or the mechanic that works on the brakes of your car, are qualified with much lower requirements.
What I would say is that there are good and bad ones, in all professions, and there are some that excel in some aspects of there professionl but are not so good elsewhere. So shop around.
And yes I have more than a few tales I could tell! 😂
I don't believe for a second that they didn't instantly fix that obvious fault and test it, than realized they didn't have enough content for a video... Only difference is they aren't trying to charge the guy for there time.
Did that connection point get put into a new junction point or is there still exposed conductors above the cupboards?
The reason the insulation tester is making some lights flick on is your powering up their switch mode power supplies with your IR tester... that is charging up the power supply capacitors....then when the voltage builds up enough the circuit triggers an output..... but not enough for continuous operation.
Best video you have posted in months and months. Everyday electrics and no solar. Might re-subscribe to the channel if you post more of this content…
Given the state of things, I wouldn't trust turning the lights off at the switch would necessarily make the light fittings themselves safe!
The irony of it being "too simple".... kitchen fitter / builder "special". Cheers
easy overlooked in tight constraints i do love a tight area .. Shhhhh
Nice Megger. you want a borescope kit .I am Professional Rescue mechanic i use the atex right angle from Unilite Great tools .
Somewhere you have a switched neutral and ground wire. I've had this issue before with a builder who thought they knew how to do electrical work. Just a thought
Finds neutral and earth tied together and spends half a year fsult finding after it! 😂😂
Madness 😂
17:15 Extra customer service? You mean so you can charge him to replace any faulty RCDs or out-of-date smoke alarms...
4:06 Is this normal in the UK to leave those rail exposed like that? Here we have to cut them to size, so whenever you add another unti you have to replace the rail since it's now to short.
Another option would be to fit the extra units and mark them as "reserve" for future expansion but that is rarely done for several reasons one being cost.
Another Rock Star🤔
in the UK a CPC is that the same as a Ground wire in the USA?
Yes. Generally known and 'Earth' but if you want to be over technical then CPC - Circuit Protective Conductor
my neighbor who was a friend knocked on our door knowing
that i was somekind of a electrical something or other exasperated .
I had three different contracters come out and none fixed it I'm tired
of throwing good money after bad results . a ground fault breaker was
tripping for no reason she explained ..here the lawn sprinklers were the culprit .
the solenoids were burred in the ground and the terminators were not
water sealed.. GFI's were throughout the home ..kitchen tripped, solinoids
were sourced from garage
Hi is it a fault if neutral and ground bonding connected in multiple points?
I think the same builder must've done my electrics when he wired an electric water heater circuit and a 13amp double socket circuit so the wires were crossed so they actually shared the same circuits, so if you thought you were switching off either circuit at the consumer unit both were actually always on! I think one of those little beepy live wire testers might've saved my life when I was trying to figure out what he'd done! I have a proper electrician coming shortly so will be interesting to see what else he might find. 😂
Always the last thing you think is the think
Here in North America those lights would have worked fine, the current would have returned back to the panel via the ground wire, we only have GFCI/AFCI on certain circuits close to sinks in the bathroom and basement, the main feed breaker only serves as overcurrent protection.