Help regarding wiring ceiling spotlight bar

Hi there,

I am having some trouble wiring a pair of JCC Royal Blue quad chrome ceiling spotlight bars! I've recently bought a repossessed flat in need of renovations which I have been carrying out mostly myself. I have friends who are tradespeople including an electrician but this last job has me stuck.

The living room where I want to install these lights has loop in wiring and I have removed the old ceiling roses and identified the switch live wire. I have screwed the three red wires from the ceiling into 1 terminal of a 4 terminal block, then the switch live, the two black neutral and the earth into terminals one by one. Then I have run a length of 3 core wire from each of the corresponding terminals (switch live - brown), (black neutral - blue) and ( earth-green yellow) on the block to the light fitting and connected them.

However every time I put the power back on the fuse trips off again once the switch is in the on position. It is doing this with both lights. I thought there might be something wrong with the actual lights and so does by electrician friend but I wondered if anyone had any other ideas. I contacted the place I got the lights from but they say a problem with the actual light is very rare especially two of them.

Rather than go off and buy different lights (I quite like the look of these and have a triple spotlight disc in the kitchen) and have the hassle of trying to return these I wanted to see if there was anything I was missing?

Cheers

you obviously didn't ID the switch wire right then..

why 3 core, you don't need the per live at the fitting, where are you connecting it to?

rg2208 said:

I have ..identified the switch live wire

Click to expand...

On the face of it the likeliest cause is that you haven't.

Still - should be easy enough to check with your multimeter/continuity tester.

disconnect the "3 core" ( which now I've read it properly is flex by the sound of it? ) from the terminal block the original wiring is in and see if it still trips, if it does then you've definitely mis-identified the switch wire..

No when I disconnect the flex from the terminal block the switch at the circuit breaker box no longer trips. Indeed this is also the case when I leave the flex attached at the terminal block and disconnect the wires at the light fitting.

I will get my friend to double check the switch live using his test lamps but I'm pretty sure they are correctly identified. I'm thinking it is a fault with the lights themselves as the wiring seems to be in order and the old ceiling roses worked fine.

ok, so then you put the live in the earth hole on the fitting?

or are they perhaps 12V fittings that require an external transformer?

do us a photo of them and the connections.. and the pins of the lamps too..

Sorry about the picture quality as my camera isn't great and obviously I only have lamps lighting the living room:

//www.diynot.com/network/rg2208/albums/

As you can see the 3 reds are terminated in the 4 way terminal block. The two black neutrals feed the blue neutral cable in the flex. The black with red sleeve switch live feeds the brown live cable in the flex and the earth feeds the earth cable to the light fitting.

You can't see very well but there is a seperate terminal block on the light fitting for the earth and then one for the live and neutral with brown and blue cable from the light fitting itself also connected to this block.

You think there might be something wrong with the lights ... unlikely that both are rogue, but you can double check simply by putting up a couple o cheap ordinary pendants in ther place. If the problem goes away you've got dud light fittings; if the problem doesn't go away you've got dud wiring.

PJ

Just thought I'd post an update as often the resolution to such issues is not reported.

I bought two replacement ceiling spotlights sold by Lidl and installed them and they worked perfectly. Therefore it seems I was sold two defective spotlights. They came from an Ebay seller so I guess there is a lesson in there about who to buy such items from.

Thanks to all for their responses to the post.