Faulty Hotpoint fridge/freezer

[jimblev]

Can anyone help me??

I bought a Hotpoint fridge/freezer in January and over the past 2 weeks it has started to trip my electricity supply. The 1st time it happened I called out British Gas and they tested the electrics and said that the fridge/freezer was faulty. I contacted Littlewoods (where I purchased the item) and they sent out a Hotpoint engineer to test the appliance. He found no fault at the time so I switched the appliance back on and about 10 hours later the electrics tripped again. Again an engineer was sent out and the same result occurred. I then contacted Littlewoods again to ask for a replacement/refund and they (after much correspondence) asked for the British Gas report, which I e-mailed to them. They then came back to me and said that because my fusebox was not up to 17th Edition Standard that maybe this was causing the problem and that I had to get an independent electrical engineer to test the appliance, and that if he found that the appliance was faulty they would give me a refund.
Can someone please give me some advice on this??

 

[kbdiy]

What exactly is tripping? The circuit protector - RCD, MCB etc - or the main switch? Could you not temporarily connect to another circuit, via an extension lead, to verify that it isn't just an over-sensitive breaker?

 

[jimblev]

Im not sure what is tripping it............I will try the extension lead theory, thanks.

 

[kbdiy]

By all means do. But you still haven't made clear what exactly is tripping - is it an individual circuit breaker or is it the entire unit, in other words the main CU switch? Do all the electrics in the house go off or just one circuit?

 

[jimblev]

All the electrics in the house go off (apart from the lights).

 

[rjm2k]

post a photo of your CU switches and point out which one needs resetting

 

[Iggifer]

sounds to me like a split load board protected by one RCD with the lights on the non-rcd side of the board, and it's tripping the RCD.

Faulty fridge/freezer for sure. Littlewoods are just trying to shirk their responsibility

 

[kbdiy]

All the electrics in the house go off (apart from the lights).

.... so not ALL. At least we are narrowing it down.

As suggested, a photo would be more helpful. It would also be less time-consuming if there was only one thread running on this topic instead of 2 - here and in Electrics