earth leakage tripping

[ELECT 1]

This is why we dont put stoves on the Earth Leakage.
I have had a tripping problem on a house which gave me some night mares. The ELU trips, i go check no down to earth on neutral or Live.
A few hours later trips again. I remove all neutral wires off the elu neutral bar. I get one neutral down to earth 000 like zero. Now i am happy. check the lives and all is fine, check the neutral and the blinking wire is fine..WTF ...anyway i know there must have been an issue with that Neutral, i traced it out to the pool. I check the pool, all ok......but while meggering out the neutral wires i hear a hissing noise and a burning smell. Viola, i see the problem. Pool guys cut the lead from the chlorinater off and the moisture between the three wires in the captyre was just enough to trigger the ELU. So alot of investigation goes into some problems and the customer complains why does it take so long...It is a very satisfying feeling to find the fault. Its like a victory.

[ACEsterhuizen]

Thought this was worth a bump, I wondered how you were getting on with the new clamp meter, I'm sure you will have given some good usage by now.

Thanks again for the recommendation Andy that little meter paid itself on the first two calls re earth leakage tripping and the flexible clamp is a winner. Really easy to pinpoint earth faults on circuits under load/live.

[Boosted]

Following on with ians original thread, I had a similar situation the other day. For some or other reason the office lights at our mine are supplied through an earth leakage relay.
These lights are all fluorescent 5 foots. Usually a CB will feed several fittings. Luckily this only was only feeding five.

What is the best way to test such lighting systems, as I see if you test the ballast to earth, all are down? Do you just start at a point and work towards the faulty light or is there an easier way to do it. From what I've seen in recent posts, you guys have years of experience and know what you are talking about.

When I was an Appy many many years ago I worked at a big plant with hundreds of lights on different floors. One breaker fed many lumanaires and if one was faulty, it would be a nightmare trying to locate it. Each fitting was about 4M high and you would need a scaffold just to get it it.
The artisan who I worked with at that time showed me a little trick, which I never used because it is dangerous. He would take a 35mm wire and hold it across the tripped circuit breaker, bridging it out. This would result in the faulty lumanaire burning out the shorted ballast. He could thereafter reset the breaker and all the other lights would work as normal.

I would have liked to see what the wiring feeding those lights looked like after doing that a few times and would never recommend that anyone try it.