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Electricity after storms


Halldfandid
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We have had endless problems with our electricity since storms on Saturday. There is no pattern to it - sometimes the power lasts 20 seconds before it cuts out sometimes several hours. I unplugged everything except the fridge and it was still knocking itself off at random intervals. We had to leave the house and come home yesterday - left the electricity on but I am sure it was off again within 10 minutes of us leaving the house.

I am just about to get in touch with our local french electrician but before I do so - is the "main fuse box" the one with the main on/off and the circuit breakers for all the circuits an Interrupteur differential  or a  disjoncteur de branchement   or something else ?

Is it likely that the "main circuit breaker" ie the one for the main on/off switch has been damaged by a power surge due to the lightening ? That's what it feels like but I am no electrician.

Any clues before I contact the electrician would be most welcome.

Thanks.

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First point :- when the power goes off does your incoming breaker trip and do you reset it ?

If your breaker is NOT tripping then the power failure is beyond your property and is on the EDF network. In this case your electrician will be unable to do anything.

If it is your incoming circuit breaker which is continually tripping then that is a problem for you.

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Neighbours may have been knocked our briefly by the same storm but they are not having the ongoing post-storm problems. Spoke with them yesterday. I think it is definitely a problem within the house and because it is non-specific ie no one circuit goes or seems to cause a problem just the main switch I wondered if the fuse ?? on that switch had been damaged.

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We've had a similar problem for 8 years!

Our electricity supplier SEOLIS came out once when I telephoned them and asked for an engineer but he said our main trip switch was fully functional, even though it's got a date of 1989 on it. I asked for it to be replaced at my cost but they refused. Things came to a head when we got back from a trip to UK (for my mother's funeral) to find that the electricity must have been off for about a week and all the food in the freezer was ruined, including all of the freshly frozen fruit pies and garden stuff my wife had grown. Just about the last straw!

On this occasion they suggested that I get a neighbour to check the house every day and reset the switch if necessary as that's what most people do; not exactly the most leading-edge technological advance in circuit control! My electrician said exactly the same thing; seems it's very common. One of my neighbours wondered if it was because we are on a 6kv supply and therefore it wouldn't take much of a surge to trip it!!?? Not sure I follow that.

In fact we now ask our neighbour down the lane to keep an eye on the house (which is reassurring for other reasons too), and I also leave a table lamp on a timeswitch in the hall so that he can see at a glance in the evening when he passes whether the electricity has failed (or the bulb has blown!!!).

The advice I got from SEOLIS was that it "MUST" be a fault on our internal wiring, but this has all now been renewed, so I'm sceptical.

I found this http://www.d-home-otik.com/arc-reenclencheur-c-70.html  (watch the small video), but they're hellishly expensive!

We're in the country on the edge of a small village, and the supply arrives via overhead lines. I guess it's more susceptible to storm interference.

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Mmmmm...... edge of village..... overhead power lines... this is sounding all too familiar. In our case - why now ? Storms are nothing new - house was totally rewired 7 years ago - yes occasionally they throw the electricity off but we have never before had this inability to get it to go back on and stay on.

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Maybe in your case something in the house has been damaged ? It was suggested that an earth may be faulty but our wiring is quite new.

You could try turning off every contact breaker ("disjoncteur") on your switchboard and then try to turn on your main switch. In our case the main switch is some distance away from the house in what was a barn closest to the road, which means much walking back and forth, and yes, I've already done this procedure. If it now stays on, you need to turn on each circuit in turn, singly, to see if one of them causes the main switch to trip. If that works OK and individual ones allow the main switch to stay on, then try adding circuits one by one until it trips off. This may identify the culprit.

As I say, I've gone through all this and so far when I switch the main switch back on it stays on, which to me indicates that it was an momentary surge.

We get this probably twice a year and usually not in the winter months. It's not an overload problem either as I don't have to turn anything off when I reset.

If yours won't stay on how about contacting your supplier?

We're more or less resigned to this now.

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