Hi all, i'm a home owner just looking for some advice.
Over Christmas the RCD on a split panel fuse box kept tripping. We narrowed this down to the master bathroom underfloor heating. The buildout for the loft including the master bathroom is about two years old, the UFH is under tiles. I think it's a ProWarm matt.
We had an electrician come out and while looking at it he also identified our fuse box was not in great shape. We've had all kinds of electrical issues since we bought the house a few years back. So I decided to replace the entire fuse board which he did last week. We had a very vague hope the new board may resolve the RCD issues of the heated floor, but alas my luck isn't that good. I'm still happy with the new fuse panel and glad we made that change, but now I have to figure out what to do with the floor.
The electrician bought a thermal camera and we looked at it. There's two hotspots and one of them he believes two wires are too close and he's thinking they have bonded and shorted. Of course this means lifting tiles, repairing wiring and then tiles. Undesirable for sure, but not the end of the world for one of the hotspots, but MUCH harder for the second one.
In reading other posts, I realized testing the resistance was probably a good idea. Bear in mind i'm not an electrician, just an interested homeowner who has tools. However, reading the resistances didn't make a lot of sense to me when comparing to other posts i've seen where the resistances were very different. Hence my post here to see if I can understand. So go gently please.
With the circuit power switched off, and with the floor matt live, neutral and earth disconnected from the thermostat, these readings come from the wires that would connect to the thermostat.
OHM Meter is set to 200.
Live <--> Neutral = 16.6 ohms
Live <--> Earth = 185
Neutral <--> Earth = 185
Oddly, when I measured L<->N earlier today before finding this forum, I could have sworn it was more like 35 ohms. Forgive me, but when measuring resistance does it matter which order you connect the red/black measuring leads to the wires? I think not with resistance.
So with the above measurements, is it possible to say if there's a short in the matt?
The room is about 12SqMeters but I don't know if the ProWarm matt is 100,150 or 200W because I cannot find the paperwork.
Important to note that with earth disconnected the matt warms up (that's how we used the IR gun), but as soon as the Earth is connected the RCD trips when the unit activates. This certainly suggests a short to me (sadly).
Over Christmas the RCD on a split panel fuse box kept tripping. We narrowed this down to the master bathroom underfloor heating. The buildout for the loft including the master bathroom is about two years old, the UFH is under tiles. I think it's a ProWarm matt.
We had an electrician come out and while looking at it he also identified our fuse box was not in great shape. We've had all kinds of electrical issues since we bought the house a few years back. So I decided to replace the entire fuse board which he did last week. We had a very vague hope the new board may resolve the RCD issues of the heated floor, but alas my luck isn't that good. I'm still happy with the new fuse panel and glad we made that change, but now I have to figure out what to do with the floor.
The electrician bought a thermal camera and we looked at it. There's two hotspots and one of them he believes two wires are too close and he's thinking they have bonded and shorted. Of course this means lifting tiles, repairing wiring and then tiles. Undesirable for sure, but not the end of the world for one of the hotspots, but MUCH harder for the second one.
In reading other posts, I realized testing the resistance was probably a good idea. Bear in mind i'm not an electrician, just an interested homeowner who has tools. However, reading the resistances didn't make a lot of sense to me when comparing to other posts i've seen where the resistances were very different. Hence my post here to see if I can understand. So go gently please.
With the circuit power switched off, and with the floor matt live, neutral and earth disconnected from the thermostat, these readings come from the wires that would connect to the thermostat.
OHM Meter is set to 200.
Live <--> Neutral = 16.6 ohms
Live <--> Earth = 185
Neutral <--> Earth = 185
Oddly, when I measured L<->N earlier today before finding this forum, I could have sworn it was more like 35 ohms. Forgive me, but when measuring resistance does it matter which order you connect the red/black measuring leads to the wires? I think not with resistance.
So with the above measurements, is it possible to say if there's a short in the matt?
The room is about 12SqMeters but I don't know if the ProWarm matt is 100,150 or 200W because I cannot find the paperwork.
Important to note that with earth disconnected the matt warms up (that's how we used the IR gun), but as soon as the Earth is connected the RCD trips when the unit activates. This certainly suggests a short to me (sadly).