Electrical Fault Finding
Intermittent faults, tripping breakers and problems other electricians have already failed to solve. Diagnosed by method rather than by swapping parts and hoping.
Most electrical faults are easy. The circuit is dead, you find the break, you fix it.
The ones that are not easy are the ones people ring us about: the breaker that trips once a fortnight, the lights that dim when the shower runs, the socket that works except when it rains, the fault that vanishes the moment somebody competent arrives to look at it.
Those are a different discipline entirely, and they are the reason we exist as a company.
Why we are good at this
Our engineering background is fuel refinery and petrol forecourt infrastructure and hazardous-area electrical systems. On a forecourt, an intermittent fault is not an inconvenience. It stops trading, and it does so unpredictably.
That environment does not tolerate the common approach to fault finding, which is to replace the most likely component and see whether the problem goes away. It teaches you to work structurally: isolate, measure, eliminate, prove.
We bring exactly that to a house in Roundhay with a breaker that trips on Tuesdays.
Why "replace and hope" costs more
The usual approach to a difficult fault is to change the thing most likely to be causing it. If the fault disappears, everyone declares success.
The problems with that are obvious once stated. You pay for parts that were not faulty. If the fault was intermittent, it will come back, and by then a new variable has been introduced. And you learn nothing about the actual cause, so the next occurrence starts from scratch.
We would rather spend an hour diagnosing than three hours replacing.
What we get called to
- Breakers or RCDs tripping intermittently, with no obvious pattern
- Faults that appear only in certain weather, or only when specific appliances run
- Lights flickering or dimming under load
- Sockets or circuits that work sometimes
- Burning smells with no visible cause
- Faults another electrician has already attempted
- Nuisance tripping after new equipment or an extension
What happens when we come out
We ask what you have observed, because you have more data than any instrument, when it happens, what else is running, whether weather matters.
Then we test. Insulation resistance, continuity, earth fault loop impedance, RCD performance, whatever the symptom points to. We isolate the circuit and prove where the fault is rather than inferring it.
Then we tell you what is wrong, what it will take to fix, and what it will cost, before doing the work.
Common questions
Often, yes, a good proportion of our fault work is second opinions. We cannot promise, and anyone who does is guessing, but a structured approach finds things that trial and error does not.
Yes, and tell us the pattern when you ring. Intermittent faults are the ones most worth diagnosing properly, because they are the ones most often mis-fixed.
We charge for the diagnostic time and tell you the rate before we start. Once we know what is wrong, you get a price for the repair before we do it.
It is doing its job, which is the reassuring part. But repeated tripping means something is wrong, and the wrong response is to keep resetting it. Get it looked at.
Request a quote
Tell us what you need and we will come and look. Straight advice, and a price before we start.