Why I Hate Emergency Fault Finding Jobs - Electrician Life

hello guys hope you're all well out there i'm just taking you on a journey with me today because i've just been called out to a crep restaurant in the city center where they have an issue with their electrics and i know you like a little bit of fault finding you guys so i thought i would take you with me and see if i can show you what the situation is i have no idea what to expect to be honest but i imagine that maybe there'll be some burning involved because crep restaurant they're running a lot of heavy kind of heating equipment and stuff so i'm guessing that there might be a fair bit of you know dodgy stuff going on so i thought it might be an interesting job to show you so before we get into it here thumbs up if you enjoy my videos it helps the channel to grow subscribe if you haven't done so already and i'll see you over there so here we are and basically what i found was that the sockets under the cabinets which were being used to power the crep machine had no power and the lady had already taken the cover off a couple of the sockets to try and figure out what was going on she had a look everything looked fine so she was like okay time to call an electrician and the interesting thing is that i immediately thought okay let's check the consumer unit because maybe something's tripped so i asked her did you check the consuming and she said yeah everything was on so first of all i like to do a little recce on these kind of things now so awkward in here it's so tight for space as you can see but i just tried to first of all just trace the cables because they were wired in this kind of nyj high tough type cable which is a little bit unusual and i thought maybe they were running back to a switch fuse connection unit or something or an isolator switch maybe power had been isolated so i just spent a bit of time rummaging around in the cupboards and trying to figure out where the cables came from and which sockets were on that particular circuit so there was these two in this cupboard and then in the cupboard next to it there was one socket as well um i tried to chase the nyj cables but there was several going in various directions so i just had a little poke around in this cupboard back here absolutely horrible full of grease and nastiness mouse traps and stuff but this is the joys of working in a commercial kitchen unfortunately it's never nice let me know in the comments if you guys do a lot of work like this i do take my hat off to you if you do because it is not my favorite place to be but as you can see under here there was nothing really evident it was just more of these high tough cables going to some of the other sockets further along in the cupboards really rubbish installation i mean the whole thing's just been slung in basically nothing clipped up quite a lot of excess cabling that was just tucked around everywhere but visually it all looked in good condition at least there was no damage to any of the cables or anything like that often i would guess uh rodent damage some particular fault like this because of the nature of restaurants they do tend to attract to rodents but in this case i couldn't see any rodent damage to any of the cables and it's just a case of trying to trace where the cables go but when it's so tight in these kind of covers it's really really tricky to actually find where the cables go too um uh so looking at it i realized that basically this cupboard had more cables and more sockets in it and of course it's full of stuff so i had to empty the cupboard out and amongst the jumble of cables and boxes and first aid kits and all sorts of junk i could see that there was a socket in there that had its cover removed as well so i got my plug-in tester and i thought i'll just plug into these various sockets and see if they're live so this one was live and then the one below it was also live so those ones were okay but there was another one further back with the cover loose which started to ring alarm bells to me so i thought okay let's check that one out and when i plug my plug-in tester that one was dead no power at all now the interesting thing is there was a twin and earth cable coming into it and then the high tough cable going out so this appeared to be the first point on the circuit and all the cables and connections looked okay so then my question in my mind is well where does that turn an earth cable go to and maybe the board is suspect because sometimes what happens is you've got circuit breakers that are turned on but they're actually faulty and there's no power coming out of them so i decided to check the consumer unit just take the cover off and test the outgoing side of all the circuit breakers to see if maybe one of the circuits was faulty and no power was actually coming out of the circuit breaker so a little bit of juggling with the camera and i managed to put it up out of the way and just take the cover off this board um so everything looked okay inside i thought well what i'll do is just get my voltage tester and just test the outgoing side of all the mcbs and just see if there's actually any power coming out of the all the breakers so all of the cables were live coming out of the circuit breakers all of the out outgoing terminals of the mcbs were all live and then i just did some checks from the neutral bar as well just to make sure that there was voltage not only from uh line to cpc but also line to neutral which there was so i kind of um started to wonder am i going mad here what is going on maybe there's a junction box somewhere or maybe there's a damaged cable still on that twin and earth that comes into that socket but yeah we're starting to wonder really uh how can i find this fall [Music] so i decided to try and trace this twin and earth cable feeding into the socket to see where that went back to because presumably wherever that went back to was the cause of the problem but they kind of bunched everything up together with these cable ties and stuff with a bit of a mess it looked like three different radial circuits coming into this cupboard basically so i had to try and sort of pull the twin earth cables around a bit and trace back and of course it went off into a really awkward place now this is where a vault pen comes in really handy actually because it just helps you to differentiate between the live cable which obviously it wasn't and the non-live cables which is the one that we wanted so when you've got three cables bunched together if you can separate them use a vault pen you can figure out which ones which and that was quite handy actually as it came to tracing things back so i had to pull the fridge out and here i am behind the the fridges and there were as you can see a whole bunch of twin earth cables coming through there going to various points so there was the socket here for the fridge and then there was another socket for the other fridge so i had to pull the other fridge out as well a real mess of cables real spaghetti of cables but slowly i started to get the picture of kind of where the cables were going back to so i thought well let's do a bit of a process of elimination here so as you can see we've got a socket up here which the fridge was plugged into so i thought check check that make sure that it's not on that circuit and that's like it was live so it wasn't that checked the other one here as well that was also live so it wasn't either of those cables so it's slowly kind of eliminating various points that could be problematic but these twin and earth white cables coming through here one of those it seems sorry was the one that had the problem so i had to kind of wrestle with all these appliances pull the fridge pull the other fridge out get that out of the way and then i could see behind to where those cables actually went to because i thought well they're going back to somewhere but it's kind of the opposite direction to where the distribution board is so it seems seemed a bit weird i checked those cables with my vault pen and one of them was indeed dead according to the vault pen and that cable went down into that hole in the corner so now i'm thinking okay well where does it go after that you know it goes under the floorboards great now i'm gonna have to try and start getting floorballs up maybe there's a junction box under the floor or something you know your mind starts to kind of boggle as to what the problem could be and ah you just start to think oh man this is going to be a nightmare but i could see some pipes going through the floor so that is the the dead cable so i give that a pull and you can see that that is potentially the one that we are looking for and it indeed it does go into that hole in the floor along with a heck of a lot of other cables and then to the left you can see those pipes going through and i could see a little bit of light coming through so they look like the pipes go straight through the ceiling to the floor below which is the basement and potentially the cables go through the ceiling as well so now i'm thinking okay let's go downstairs into the basement and let's see if we can see anything below see if we can find those cables the other side of the floor so grab a few tools and head downstairs so i can immediately see this trunking on the ceiling which is a big trunking and this one cable coming down is the dado but i can also see the pipes on the ceiling that came through from above so i know that i'm getting warm and as soon as i trace visually that trunking it goes along the ceiling and guess what i find ah there's another db look oh my goodness all right ah everything's on oh no there we go off that's it ah man that will be that will be it i bet yeah i'll be the one crazy [Applause] so so i went back down to isolate that circuit so that i could put the socket outlets back together and then do some final testing basically so um flick the circuit breaker off and then headed back up to put the covers on now it's just so tight these kind of cupboards even a simple job like fitting a socket face back on is just a real real real nightmare you've got to kind of just work at such weird awkward angles like sort of one-handed screwdriver tightening really difficult in this kind of small space but i managed it but then one of the screws was missing and i just saw it in the cracks between the floorboards and thank goodness for magnetic screwdrivers there you go good old client screwdrivers link in the description so so i just wanted to check the connections on these sockets while i was there just to make sure that they're all tight before i put put them back hey do you have the screws from that socket that you took off yeah you found something uh yes it was um i'll i'll explain to you in a minute but it's it's it should be all fine now um so the lady had kindly uh kept the screws in the little pot where they keep the tips so i managed to salvage the screws because i didn't have any with me in the car park was about 10 minutes walk away and managed to get that cover screwed back on thank you great so here what i was doing was just plugging in my earth loop impedance tester my fluke multi-function tester and doing a zs reading at each socket just to make sure that everything was as would be expected obviously um you know that gives me a polarity reading as well and it just makes sure that i'm leaving the circuit in a safe condition um because you know i don't know for sure why it had tripped presumably it was just an appliance plugged in but you can never tell so you want to leave everything in a safe condition for the customer so i did zs on all three sockets and then i did some rcd tests as well just to make sure that the rcbo is working correctly all right guys well that is it all done and dusted and that's how it goes sometimes um but as you can see i absolutely hate doing commercial installs like fault finding is just a nightmare like you can see there's just stuff everywhere you're working around people uh it's just such a challenge so anyway it's all back on um circuit's on i'm gonna just explain to the customer what happened now basically i think it was just an appliance that was plugged in and had a little bit of an issue tripped the circuit breaker and because they didn't know where it is they couldn't find how to reset it so because it was buried in all this junk you know that's safety wise you know fire safety wise and stuff it's not really ideal having a distribution board in the basement where you end up inevitably storing loads of stuff everywhere but it happens so often i mean i don't know many small shops and companies like this that have enough space to have a dedicated room where the distribution equipment is it's all just a hodgepodge just always the way it is unfortunately [Music] oh wow right so back at the car uh and um a couple of nice little surprises on the way back to the car um number one before you leave they said ah why not have a crap so i got a lovely um cheese and ham crepe to munch away on now which i'm quite pleased with because it is lunch time uh sorry let's see if it's any good very nice the other thing was i put my parking ticket in to the machine because i'm in a multi-story car park because i'm right in the city center and it said on the screen nothing to pay that's like a miracle that never happens in cambridge i don't know what's happened but i'm guessing they're trying to encourage people to come into the city center maybe free parking in the city centre that is like insane so yeah a little bit of a win there which compensates for crawling around in a greasy kitchen underneath underneath units and stuff um yeah absolutely hate it but sometimes it has to be done the real life of an electrician i mean it was an office day for me again today and none of the guys were available so i was just like look i'll just go out and do it you know we have worked for them before and trying to keep customers happy so they're happy power's back on now they can crack on with making out loads of crepes which is all good city center is super busy today absolutely mad there's tons of people but i guess today it's it's the end of lockdown so well you know pubs are open pub gardens are going to be open and stuff like that so everyone's getting in the vibe of summer i think i'm starting to get out and about anyway i hope you enjoyed that little video um hope it was interesting to you smash a thumbs up if you liked it subscribe if you haven't done so already and we'll see you on the next one thank you all of you for watching and have a great day [Music] you

Channel: Artisan Electrics

Views: 184,234

Keywords: artisan electrics, electrician life, electrical fault finding, electrical fault finding techniques, electrical fault finding uk, fault finding electrical circuits, testing and inspection, fault finding, how to fault find, electrical fault diagnosis, rcd tripping fault finding, electrical fault finding methods, electrical faults, troubleshooting electrical panel, troubleshooting electrical problems, fault finding electrical circuits practical, fault finding test

Id: NK5Ghcm4sfM

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021