Safety Switch keeps Tripping!
- Edelman Electrics
- Apr 18, 2016
- 2 min read
It’s an emergency, our safety switch keeps tripping! A common call from our customers
The safety switch or RCD is doing what it is designed to do and tripping on a fault on your electrical circuit, often the culprit is a faulty appliance and you can fix this problem yourself without the emergency call out charge.
At the very least you can reduce the time your Electrician spends identifying “what is not the problem” and reduce the cost to you.
What we tell our customers is to try this step by step fault finding plan to help identify the problem!
The most common can be heating appliances such as faulty kettles, toasters, microwaves, dishwashers, washing machines, dryers and fridges, even range hoods and any other appliance plugged into a power point.
Make sure you unplug the power boards, as although these will often have their own internal overload trip (red button on side), these can also be faulty.
Make sure you push the the safety switch all the way OFF, before switching it back ON, as often they will not switch off totally.
OK, you have done all this, now start plugging them back in 1 at a time, as soon as it trips you have found the culprit.
If all this fails or the safety switch does not reset, you will need an Electrician to sort out the problem, give us a call we can confirm this over the phone and organise a site visit to get you up and running again
Infrequent Safety Switch Tripping
So your safety switch only trips occasionally, it can be a lot harder to identify the problem in this case, examples of problems we have encountered are moisture/water in outdoor power points or lights, a leak in the pool equipment tripping the circuit, a leak from the dishwasher into the electrical wiring.
There can be a number of reasons and in this case you will need an Electrician, he will have the equipment to test the circuits and determine the problem, although it is not always easy to identify, and often they will need some experience to recognise the likely problem, test and fix.
