Lights flickering

[John]

I arrived home one night last week to find all the lights flickering, at the time the cooker was on, along with the dryer, heaters, dishwasher etc. The boiler has been condemned and we are currently using electric heaters and immersion to supplement the gas fire. Anyway, on entering the garage to see if I could see anything wrong with the fusebox, there was a very strong smell of melting bakelite. Turned out, we had overloaded the system and manage to melt the fusebox. Fortunately we managed to get an electrician out the next day who replaced the fusebox and wiring with a split consumer unit.

However, when the iron is plugged in the socket in living room , with no other major appliances on, the lights are still flickering occasionally. The lights are on a different circuit to the sockets and the fusebox doesn't appear to be warm. This wasn't noticeable before the meltdown. Is it possible that the wiring has been damaged elsewhere as well?

Thanks

John

[Harry Bloomfield]

John used his keyboard to write :

The overload obviously caused damage to the cable where it terminated in the fuse box, I wonder if the cables were properly stripped back to good clean copper?

Another possibility is that other damage has been done at another point, possibly an Henley joint block, the meter or where the tails enter the the cut out. There might even be damage to an underground cable joint.

None of the above problems should happen, if the jobs have/had been done in a workman like way, with correctly rated fuses/MCB's in place and tight connections.

Warm, is caused by a large current flowing through poorly made or inadequately rated connections or cables. Flickering would be a symptom of a poorly made connection irrespective of the loading upon it - or it could just be normal volts drop due to the increased load as the irons thermostat turns itself on and off. Volts drop is perfectly normal - your lights will dim slightly as a load is applied, then brighten as the load turns off, they certainly should not flicker.

Get the engineer back out, express your concerns to him and ask him to recheck for problems.

[John]

Many thanks for the quick and comprehensive reply. I'll contact the electrician after the New Year.

Regards

John

[Dave Liquorice]

All presumably plugged into the one ring main, downstairs?

With a load suffcient to cause rather a lot of heating in the fuse (do you mean fuse as in a bit of wire or a cartridge?) they could well have been similar haeting elsewhere in the ring particulary at any point with a slightly below par connection.

Does it matter which socket you plug the iron into or is it only one particular one that causes the flickering. An describe "flickering" a bit more, on/off or just dimming?

I think you were lucky to have come home and reduced the load before the house went up in flames.

[John]

Mostly, yes.

It was an old type fuse box with wires that could be replaced.

Every couple of minutes there is a noticeable flicker. The lights momentarily dim. They don't appear to go off completely but it is very noticeable. I've since tried another socket and the lights didn't dim, but then I tried the original socket and they didn't dim with it either that time. Seems to be an intermittent problem.

Cheers

John

[Matty F]

We had a flickering problem for weeks. It turned out to be a faulty pole fuse, i.e. on the power pole outside. The power company said that we should have complained about it before it got so bad.