Electrical faults traced, not guessed at.

Deal with this now, not tomorrow

Other symptoms are annoying rather than dangerous, but they’re still the installation telling you something: a breaker that trips every few days, lights that dim when the kettle goes on, a socket that only works sometimes.

How a fault actually gets found

Electrical fault finding is a process of division. Rather than replacing parts and hoping, the circuit gets split and tested section by section until the fault is isolated to one accessory, one cable or one appliance.

What that involves

• Establishing what changed and when — new appliance, recent work, wet weather, a specific time of day.
• Insulation resistance testing to find breakdown between conductors, which is what most persistent RCD trips turn out to be.
• Splitting the circuit at junctions to halve the search area each time.
• Testing appliances separately, because a good proportion of “circuit faults” are a faulty appliance rather than the wiring.

Intermittent faults are the hard ones, and honest expectation-setting matters: a fault that appears twice a month may not appear while we’re there. In that case we narrow it down as far as testing allows and tell you what we’ve eliminated, rather than charging for a fix that might be a guess.

The usual culprits

RCD tripping

Normally moisture or a deteriorating appliance element — immersion heaters, ovens, washing machines and outdoor sockets are the regulars. On older split-load boards one fault takes out half the house, which is why individual RCBOs make faults easier to live with as well as easier to trace.

Dead sockets

Usually a loose connection at a socket further up the ring, often one that’s been disturbed by flooring or furniture. It’s rarely the socket that’s dead that’s at fault.

Dimming and flickering

Sometimes a lamp or driver, sometimes a poor connection carrying more resistance than it should. The second one warms up, which is why it’s worth looking at rather than living with.

What you get

We tell you what the fault was, where it was and what caused it — and where it points to something broader, we’ll say so. Repeated faults on multiple circuits in an older property usually mean it’s worth having an EICR to see the whole picture rather than fixing them one at a time.