Immersion tripping sockets

él statutorio

Hi folks,

Looking for a bit of advice here. Back in November I moved into a new place, the immersion switch was your typical on/off sink/bath job. I had a pain in my hole turning it on and off so I fitted a timer to it in December and it was all working away flawlessly til about a week or so ago.

It has randomly started tripping the sockets in the house when it comes on. Now this would initially seem that the immersion itself is kaput but it does work. Last night for example I set the timer to come on at 3 seperate 15 minute intervals and they all worked fine. No trips.

The night before I set it tom come on for a different set of times and it tripped.

Initially i thought that it was something overheating and I had it set to come on for 15 mins every 4 or so hours. This would work sometimes but othertimes would trip all the sockets.

The only thing that has changed recently is that an electrical pump was replaced a few weeks before this all started happening. I don't think that it's the cause but it's the only thing I have to go on.

Sorry for the long winded post, hopefully I have given enough info that someone might have a solution!

Solair

The RCD is tripping because it's detecting leakage from the circuit (to earth).

It could be a wiring fault (e.g. something not screwed down properly / a connection touching a metal casing somewhere)

It could be a water leak where water's getting into the terminals of the heating element or some other area.

It could be a faulty element that's shorting to the body of the tank somehow.

...

All I could tell you is that you've got an earth leakage that's what the RCD is detecting and why it's tripping.

You need to get that investigated as it's not safe to operate the water heater in that condition as you could end up getting a shock in the shower should the RCD fail to detect it somehow.

.....

If I were you, I would call an electrician to check it over. You really don't want to be creating a situation where you could have live plumbing.

él statutorio

Thanks for that Solair.

I doubt it's a water leak, no signs of any leakage in there at all.

I'll check all the connections tonight so. I'm pretty confident that my wiring job from the switch to the timer is solid but I'll disconnect everything tonight and double check it. (in fairness it did work without issues for about 5 months).

It probably is the new pump in that case. I'll have a look at that tonight as well, maybe it wasn't wired up in the tidiest manner (the plumber did it, not me!). If that was the case, it might've taken a knock as there's a lot of stuff just flung into that hotpress and something may have been knocked loose.

The puzzling thing is the intermittant nature of the problem. If it was happening every time the timer came on it'd make more sense but the fact that it's random is annoying me.

Diggerdunne

Disconnect the timer and put it back to normal and turn it on a few times and see if it still trips out to rule out the timer being faulty..... Then you can look at the switch itself to make sure it has not broken down and leaking to earth...its a game of elimination.... Test the element and see what resistance you are getting on it.... shud get between 18-24 ohms to make sure that is ok... You shud really megger it to test under operating voltage but you prob dont have a megger.....

gdavis

my moneys on the element gone