Light fitting

More likely it's not wired correctly.

NT

Yes your credibility in the family.

Bill

Yes indeed and have we all not done that many times before? However I think I'd want to make sure the fitting and its bulb worked as well in case its a duff one.

The problem with ceiling roses for the uninitiated is that they can, at least in UK, contain lives that are not switched as well as one that is. If you have more than one switch the thing tends to get quite mind numbing. Of course, It also might not do the writers cred any good posting from that Home owners hub dodgy web based newsgroup site either. Brian

Upload some photos somewhere, then post a link to them here ...

I did it once (and killed the MCB).

Owain

A year or two back, my neighbours were having a kitchen re-vamp as part of an extension. Having removed the ceiling rose along with the ceiling, while waiting for the sparky to arrive the next day, the builder kludged the wires into a choc-block (all reds together, all blacks together, don't bother with the earths).

The neighbour walked into the kitchen, knowing there was no light but old habits die hard, so clicked the light switch anyway ... BANG!!

Sounds like you still have a wiring problem. Lights and ceiling rose connections are often somewhat non intuitive since you frequently have a wire of the wrong colour in there to confuse things!

If you look at:

You will see the difficulty comes with the wire that goes to the switch. That needs to take a live feed to the switch, and then bring it back again. That means that both the wires are used as live conductors, but one of them is (usually) coloured as a neutral. There should be some over sleeving or tape on the re-proposed neutral, but that is often missing.

If you give us a bit more detail on what wires you have, and perhaps a photo, we can give you a step by step process to fix it.

Unlikely.

I welded a screwdriver blade to the screw once due to a whisker of the wire touching it from the adjacent connection. Brian

Oh dear, well we used to have old fashioned fuses as well, and remembering which wire was for which circuit was a little hard and of course we were all in the dark and torches in those days batteries tended to last about five minutes. Brian

Yes at least in our house the wires have the old red and black which in fact means a light probe can be used by a blind person. The brown and blue reflect light equally and hence cannot be seen as different by the device which is just light and less light so to speak. However, nowadays I think the climbing on steps and fiddling with mains wires days are long over for me. I get a bit dizzy before you start worrying about the lack of eyesight!

Brian

For those of you who remember rise and fall lights over the dining table, after I fitted one in my Victorian house (nice high ceilings!) a friend and neighbour of mine decided to do the same.

That was exactly how my mate wired it.

But he wasn't a brickie, he was a GP who before turning to that calling had done medical research in Cambridge and at Harvard, who had a better golf handicap than most club pro's, and sang opera at professional level (he almost went into that instead of medicine).

Guess who fixed it.

Probably a lightswitch!

Surely a light switch in this instance is likely to fail short with welded contacts if the switched live was connected to neutral?

Yup, fair point. Wiring should be ok, but the switch could well be shagged.

It will fail in whatever way it wants to:-)

I would say 50/50 in which way on my experience.