This job was at a house in Upper Hermitage where the homeowner had lost power to part of the house. The way the switchboard was set up, multiple circuits were protected by a single safety switch, so when it tripped they lost power to the oven, power points and several other circuits.

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I started by isolating the affected circuits and narrowing down where the fault was coming from. After a bit of fault finding, it led me to the oven circuit. Once the oven was pulled out, the culprit revealed itself, a mouse had managed to get inside the appliance and short across the terminals.

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While investigating further I also found some non compliant wiring that looked to have been modified previously. The wiring was corrected, the circuit was made safe and power was restored to the affected areas of the home.

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This job was also a good example of why individual RCBO protection is worth having. With the original setup, one fault took out a large section of the house. With a modern switchboard upgrade, only the affected circuit would have tripped.

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