I ran a cable out to my shed at the end of the garden. It's a heavy duty armoured cable, 50m run or thereabouts, buried in the garden for most of its length.
At the houuse end, it terminates at a junction box and ordinary 2.5mm T&E cable runs to the consumer unit, where it's wired into a spare way left over when I ditched the electric cooker. That's an MCB and has a RCCB protecting it (30mA).
At the shed end, the cable terminates in mini consumer unit (sort of). It goes to another 30mA RCCB, that feeds three MCBs. From these, I took off the live feeds to the sockets, two lights and a pond pump. All the returns join into a connector block and back to the RCCD and out.
It all seemed straightforward but when I powered up, nothing works. The lights don't come on when I close the switch. Ditto with the pond pump, and the sockets don't power up anything plugged into them.
I checked the connections and everything seems OK. None of the breakers tripped, and there's live feed into the switches, light fittings and sockets, and to the return neutral connection on the RCCB, when any of the circuits is active.
The other peculiarity is that the RCCB at the shed end won't trip when the test button is pressed.
I'm completely baffled by it. Can anyone advise what might be the problem?
Incidentally, the switches and circuit breakers etc are mostly reused, having been salvaged from a lab strip-out where I work.
I've done a sort of sketch of the wiring below:
At the houuse end, it terminates at a junction box and ordinary 2.5mm T&E cable runs to the consumer unit, where it's wired into a spare way left over when I ditched the electric cooker. That's an MCB and has a RCCB protecting it (30mA).
At the shed end, the cable terminates in mini consumer unit (sort of). It goes to another 30mA RCCB, that feeds three MCBs. From these, I took off the live feeds to the sockets, two lights and a pond pump. All the returns join into a connector block and back to the RCCD and out.
It all seemed straightforward but when I powered up, nothing works. The lights don't come on when I close the switch. Ditto with the pond pump, and the sockets don't power up anything plugged into them.
I checked the connections and everything seems OK. None of the breakers tripped, and there's live feed into the switches, light fittings and sockets, and to the return neutral connection on the RCCB, when any of the circuits is active.
The other peculiarity is that the RCCB at the shed end won't trip when the test button is pressed.
I'm completely baffled by it. Can anyone advise what might be the problem?
Incidentally, the switches and circuit breakers etc are mostly reused, having been salvaged from a lab strip-out where I work.
I've done a sort of sketch of the wiring below: