Hi All,
I embarked on these changes earlier in the week and have come away with more questions than I started with...
None of my previous testing made any sense and I spent half the day testing again. I was hoping to do a quick verification of the previously identified faults and then move straight to making the necessary changes. Felt like I was in a different house! I am desperately trying to recall the confusion I faced as I wanted to make sense of it all afterwards. I am hoping you can solve a few puzzles for me. Here’s my recollection of events.
- Started by locking off the MCB for the affected ring
- Ran around with socket tester and all went to plan. This identified the sockets on this ring.
- Removed a random socket (landing) on the ring. Different to the one I removed previously
- I grabbed the ends of live and live - continuity was good. Same on neutral and no continuity on earth. Again, as noted in EICR
- I then went to the socket upstairs (bedroom) where I was convinced the earth break was (between here and the living room). Unscrewed the bedroom socket and had the cables hanging in the air. I wanted to double check that this is definitely and directly connected to the living room socket, where I was planning to insert the new cable as it has a break in earth. To be absolutely certain that these two sockets are connected, I grabbed the neutral and live of the same cable and checked continuity on these (on the bedroom socket), I expected this to fail as the socket on the other end (living room) was in tact and hence wired in the conventional manner i.e. no connection between live and neutral I thought? However, this was reporting continuity across live and neutral on both wires in the bedroom socket. I am sure there will be a plausible reason for this but this caused me real confusion. I would love to hear an explanation for this…
- I then unwired the socket in the living room. This is the socket I believed the bedroom socket was connected to. I unwired this and had the cables hanging in the air
- I then checked the live and neutral on the bedroom socket again. Now it worked as expected. No continuity reported across Live and Neutral on the same wire. When I joined the live and neutral at the newly removed socket in the living room, I got continuity. I then tried live and earth - nothing. Neutral and earth - nothing. This had me convinced that I had two sockets next to each other on the ring and this is where the earth break was.
- As a further test, I used my wonder lead and connected it to the incoming Earth on the living room socket and then to the incoming earth in the bedroom. After doing this, I tested continuity on the hallway socket again, everything tested successfully.
- With this established, I then started removing the floor boards in the bedroom - in anticipation of checking if the break was within the floor board or alternatively, I was planning to replace the entire cable (in the wall, down to the living room). This is where the plot thickened!
- The cables under the floor boards suggested that the bedroom socket wasn't connected to the living room socket. The cable was clearly going to and coming from different sockets. Incidentally, the bedroom socket was receiving it's connection from a socket near the living room socket in question (but not that one). To avoid confusion, let's call this socket the TV socket. This TV socket was then going to the living room socket.
- I then unwired the TV socket and had the wires hanging in the air. At this point the earlier testing with live and neutral (between bedroom and living room sockets), no longer worked. It was clearly only working because the TV socket was providing some sort of circuit but again, I don’t understand why the live and neutral would return continuity in this situation….
- I then did the live and neutral (on same wire) test between the bedroom and TV socket and this returned continuity. I could also see that the earth break was between the TV socket and the Living room socket
- I then terminated this cable at both ends (living room and TV sockets) with a 3 way wago and inserted a new cable between these two sockets
- After doing this, I connected up all sockets apart from the one in the landing. I returned here for one final continuity test across all 3 wires and it was successful
- Finally, I energised the circuit, tested all the sockets with a socket tester and everything appears to be fine.
This was a far cry from the simple resolution I was anticipating but importantly, it has left me with unanswered questions - as you can see from the above.
Look forward to your wisdom on this matter. Thanks again.