Gentlemen,
I was in my workshop earlier today buggering around, when - with no provocation at all - the lights all went out. My lights are in 3 clusters, each with their own switch. I checked the breakers and sure enough, the breaker for the lighting (which supplies these 3 clusters) had thrown-out. So I thought I'd turn 'em all off, then switch them back in one at a time to find out which cluster was causing the problem. The first time I tried this, cluster 1 came on fine. Then I turned on cluster 2 and that was fine, too. On switching in cluster 3, however, the breaker tripped again immediately. So I thought I'd narrowed the fault down to cluster 3's circuit. Anyway, to cut a long story short, when I repeated this test, with all
3 clusters switched off, it was impossible to reset the lighting breaker; it just popped out immediately, even with none of the lights switched on. I'm just wondering if the fault therefore might be in the breaker itself. Can they just 'go' like that with no warning? And if so, what's the typical failure mode?
Cheers,
CD