This customer in Wynn Vale contacted me on a Friday afternoon after suddenly losing all of the lights in their home.

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I started by testing the lighting circuit to work out what was causing it to trip. There was no earth leakage present, but the circuit was still tripping even with a new safety switch fitted. This meant there was an active to neutral fault somewhere on the circuit.

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These faults can be a bit tricky, as there’s no real way to test for them without knowing exactly what loads are connected to the circuit.

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I headed inside for a bit of a visual inspection and noticed some charring and soot around one of the light fittings on the ceiling. That was a pretty good clue, so I lifted a few roof tiles and had a look around above the light.

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That’s where I found the culprit.

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A possum had managed to get into the roof space and ended up across the electrical wiring, causing the active to neutral fault and taking out the entire lighting circuit.

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I removed the possum, cut out and rewired the damaged section of cable, replaced the old circuit breaker with a new Type A RCBO safety switch, then tested everything before restoring power.

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The customer had all of their lights back on that afternoon.

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Definitely not what I was expecting to find when I turned up for a lighting fault, but we got it sorted.

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