House keeps tripping when raining

B

BrentT

New Member
Joined
Mar 18, 2014
Messages
5
Howdy all,

I have this weird issue in my house, wait, the whole house is weird. We bought the house roughly 4 years ago and as usual you start to see the gremlins after moving in. The previous owners did renovations and it shows they were on a tight budget, or tried to do everything cheaply. I myself have not done any renovations that involve plumbing or running any new wire(plugs,lights, etc). We moved in during the winter season when there is no rain, then summer decided to grace us with her tears of joy we call rain.

Every time is rains, the house trips and we jump into the usual method of all breakers down, mains down then up and continue to push other breakers up one by one. There is always the one breaker(plugs) which seems to be the culprit. Cool, I know which circuit is focus on. We have a corrugated roof(Simba chip roof ;-) ) and these thing are prone to leaking if not maintained correctly.

Climb into the roof and see if there is any light coming down, and check all over too see water marks on the ceiling board. Cant find any....but just in case we water proof all joins and nails without putting a budget on it. I think now the whole roof is made of waterproofing, this has been done each year during winter.

The plug circuit still freaking trips.
I have had a electrician come out and to be honest all I can hear is BS, this needs fixing, this needs this, two different elec's tell me two different stories. They cant tell me they know how to certainly find the issue and tell me what its going to cost. the one told plugs are overloaded, I agree this can be an issue....but when its not raining everything is working as expected.

I have noticed at my main gate there is a round PVC electrical box, which is lying on the floor. I opened it up, noticed there are two wires, striped them back and got the multi meter out, nothing dead no current. So...

1. could these wires in the Round PVC box still be some-what live to cause a trip. It is lying on the floor, and well there is water all around it when raining ?

2. Is there a tool that I can use to find the fault, while its raining. Something to apply 3volts on the circuit and give me a estimate on how far down the fault is. I was thinking of using my tone & probe and then going into the roof and making sure those specific plugs were on the plug breaker, and not some random wire loose I did not know about being exposed.

I am not a certified sparky but there has to be a way where I can find the issue, call the elec, point and she/he can fix.

If you need more info, I will provide.
 
spiff

spiff

Executive Member
Joined
Oct 17, 2007
Messages
5,828
BrentT said:
Howdy all,

I have this weird issue in my house, wait, the whole house is weird. We bought the house roughly 4 years ago and as usual you start to see the gremlins after moving in. The previous owners did renovations and it shows they were on a tight budget, or tried to do everything cheaply. I myself have not done any renovations that involve plumbing or running any new wire(plugs,lights, etc). We moved in during the winter season when there is no rain, then summer decided to grace us with her tears of joy we call rain.

Every time is rains, the house trips and we jump into the usual method of all breakers down, mains down then up and continue to push other breakers up one by one. There is always the one breaker(plugs) which seems to be the culprit. Cool, I know which circuit is focus on. We have a corrugated roof(Simba chip roof ;-) ) and these thing are prone to leaking if not maintained correctly.

Climb into the roof and see if there is any light coming down, and check all over too see water marks on the ceiling board. Cant find any....but just in case we water proof all joins and nails without putting a budget on it. I think now the whole roof is made of waterproofing, this has been done each year during winter.

The plug circuit still freaking trips.
I have had a electrician come out and to be honest all I can hear is BS, this needs fixing, this needs this, two different elec's tell me two different stories. They cant tell me they know how to certainly find the issue and tell me what its going to cost. the one told plugs are overloaded, I agree this can be an issue....but when its not raining everything is working as expected.

I have noticed at my main gate there is a round PVC electrical box, which is lying on the floor. I opened it up, noticed there are two wires, striped them back and got the multi meter out, nothing dead no current. So...

1. could these wires in the Round PVC box still be some-what live to cause a trip. It is lying on the floor, and well there is water all around it when raining ?

2. Is there a tool that I can use to find the fault, while its raining. Something to apply 3volts on the circuit and give me a estimate on how far down the fault is. I was thinking of using my tone & probe and then going into the roof and making sure those specific plugs were on the plug breaker, and not some random wire loose I did not know about being exposed.

I am not a certified sparky but there has to be a way where I can find the issue, call the elec, point and she/he can fix.

If you need more info, I will provide.
Click to expand...
Switch off mains.


Then go and open all wall plugs covers. Check for water in wall boxes.

Check for any loose wire connections.

Tighten all electrical connections on every wall plug.
 
T

thehuman

Expert Member
Joined
Nov 2, 2004
Messages
4,240
Breaker that trip , how many wires go into it ? If more than one can isolate it more .
Else you need to find the plugs that "die" when that breaker is tripped.
 
BTTB

BTTB

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Joined
Feb 6, 2004
Messages
8,195
Please differentiate what is tripping.
1. Individual circuit breaker
2. Main circuit breaker
3. Earth leakage
 
R

reactor_sa

Executive Member
Joined
Feb 6, 2009
Messages
7,844
This used to happen to me occasionally not all the time during bad lightning storms. Could just be a overly sensitive earth leakage breaker picking up the fuzz through the Telkom line or something
 
M

Milano

Honorary Master
Joined
Feb 7, 2004
Messages
16,752
When I moved into my place I had tripping during rain. Isolated it to the plugs circuit. Push it back up. It would take anything from 5 to 30 minutes to trip again which made it difficult to isolate which wall socket even after every appliance unplugged but socket switches on. Then kept turning each empty socket off for 40 mins one at a time, eventually isolated it to the dining room. No visible water or leak anywhere but some moisture must have kept getting inside somehow.
 
maumau

maumau

Honorary Master
Joined
Aug 13, 2009
Messages
20,267
Had the 'lectric fixed for COC a month back.

Since then we've had rain twice and both times the electricity tripped. Naturally it's the circuit with router, fridge and TVs :mad:

Will phone the electrician but would love to know how to trace the fault.
 
J

John_Phoenix

Expert Member
Joined
Jul 8, 2017
Messages
1,087
Is it possible that you have water running down the inside of the wall, look for mold growth, or sagging/bubbled plaster.

The really crappy part is, the water could be in the walls behind a built in cupboard, or fitted shelving.

I am no electrician, but you should be able to "see" which wires are eroded / damaged by the resistance on the wires. Logically, you can't pull the wires out of the wall to check them, but you can measure them and establish a baseline of what the readings should be. Then investigate any outliers...
 
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rodga

Honorary Master
Joined
May 9, 2007
Messages
11,054
I have a problem when there is load shedding, when the power goes out and comes back online the earth leakage always trips and the power will stay off until turn the breaker back on again. This is a problem when we are not home or while we are sleeping.

I've tried to isolate the problem by turning off each breaker one at a time when there is load shedding. But haven't been able to find the problem one yet.

When we got the first rains, the earth leakage tripped again and it happened to be the circuit that operates the gate, some external lights, garage and the Wendy house. I'm hoping this is the same circuit that is an issue when there is load shedding.

I want to get someone out but want to narrow it down as much as possible, to prevent being fed any bs.
 
LazyLion

LazyLion

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Joined
Mar 17, 2005
Messages
105,603
Good Luck, we ended up re-wiring our entire house (twice) to solve a problem like this. Cost us R36K.
Not complaining though because we bought the house on auction for R195K.
It's now worth R1.5M (after R300K of repairs).

Finally turned out there was a wire in the kitchen light switch that was partly stripped and was touching the conduit housing halfay up. There was no way to know that without pulling out every wire in the house.

Hope yours is easier.
 
M

Marsie27

Senior Member
Joined
Jul 21, 2014
Messages
800
We had one plug circuit that would periodically trip the earth leakage. Eventually, after unplugging everything on that circuit (or moving the item temporarily to another plug point) we figured out it was the dishwasher plug which is in a cupboard on an outside wall. We got an electrician to check and he couldn't find a fault, and there's no sign of damp. So now if it happens we know to pull out the DW plug for a while, and if we go away we switch off that plug.
 
maumau

maumau

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Joined
Aug 13, 2009
Messages
20,267
Marsie27 said:
We had one plug circuit that would periodically trip the earth leakage. Eventually, after unplugging everything on that circuit (or moving the item temporarily to another plug point) we figured out it was the dishwasher plug which is in a cupboard on an outside wall. We got an electrician to check and he couldn't find a fault, and there's no sign of damp. So now if it happens we know to pull out the DW plug for a while, and if we go away we switch off that plug.
Click to expand...

Great solution, hope we can do something similar. Keep it simple.
 
M

Marsie27

Senior Member
Joined
Jul 21, 2014
Messages
800
Years ago we had an exchange student who phoned me to say the power had gone off. She had heard a noise on the DB (she was about 1.5m from it). I went home to investigate - turned out she was making toast in our pop-up toaster and decided the bread was brown enough, so she stuck a knife into the toaster... One of those occasions when we were very glad our ELU is sensitive.
 
maumau

maumau

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Joined
Aug 13, 2009
Messages
20,267
Marsie27 said:
Years ago we had an exchange student who phoned me to say the power had gone off. She had heard a noise on the DB (she was about 1.5m from it). I went home to investigate - turned out she was making toast in our pop-up toaster and decided the bread was brown enough, so she stuck a knife into the toaster... One of those occasions when we were very glad our ELU is sensitive.
Click to expand...

Good point.

Saw our ex- domestic heading for the toaster with a knife once but managed to stop her in time.
 
T

thehuman

Expert Member
Joined
Nov 2, 2004
Messages
4,240
Talk about funny electric stories
We also had a nuisance earth leakage trip , would be intermittent .
One day i heard a buzzing noise behind one of the plug sockets, a mouse electrocuted itself behind the plug socket and some flies was attracted to it , removed mouse and nuisance trip was gone.
 
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