DeviMat Issue - Stopped Heating Up

[ban-all-sheds]

Personally I have a lot more sympathy with your plight than that shown by your other correspondent. $hit happens and it's better to try and help rather than pour more fuel on the flames.

I do have sympathy, and I'm not trying to pour fuel on any flames. But there's nothing anybody here can do to help mend or diagnose the mat.

Fundamentally though I believe that anybody and everybody deserves criticism for not thinking about the consequences of something going wrong, and how recoverable the situation would be.

Take this example: //www.diynot.com/forums/plumbing/bath-waste-position-mad-design.345943/

I had the common sense to think "what if....", and I thought about if I was prepared for the "what if" of removing the bath. And I decided I wasn't.

But the only reason that bath is like that is because the designer failed to apply common sense, and failed to think about what would happen if something went wrong. Basically I'd like to get hold of the idiot, shake him hard enough to rattle whatever brains he has, and ask him WTF he was thinking about.

Society as a whole and life in general is more and more circumscribed because people cannot be trusted or expected to exercise common sense, and to think about what might go wrong and what might happen as a result. We have developed a culture where people expect other people to do all their thinking for them and to create rules and regulations which protect them from their own idiocy.

Maybe nothing ever goes wrong in BAS's World.

If only.

But when things do I don't end up with ugly consequences because I didn't think about things.

Back to your mat. I would be very interested to know how the DeviMan plans to "heat up" a mat that has no continuity. Maybe he will use some other sort of energy trace tool.

Inject an HF signal into one end, and then the other, and trace where it radiates and where it doesn't?

 

[ban-all-sheds]

He's due next Friday so I'll update after that.

 

[simpic]

Thank you for the reminder.

The engineer visit was successful. He traced the fault and we were able to lift one tile and cut the mat at that point to fix it. The fault was 1m or so from the tail end which ran down the side near a wall so wasn't really required. Hence being able to cut the mat tail there rather than splicing in a new section.

I have relaid the tile and have a nice warm bathroom floor again.

The engineer could not see an obvious nick in the cable where the fault was so it has preliminary been put down as a manufacturers fault. Further analysis is to be carried out at the factory to confirm.

I took a couple of pictures of the tools used to trace the fault...

First a current was passed down the cable to make the fault (fusing of the load and earth wires) worse.

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Then heated up the mat using this machine (High amps, low volts) which meant we were then able to trace to fault using a Thermal Imaging Gun (£9k apparently!)

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Very helpful and knowledgeable engineer.

 

[Taylortwocities]

Glad to know its all been sorted,
an interesting pile of kit, I'll not be investing in any of that!