Being an electrician...they say our houses would have the worse wiring

Anyway i have had a tripping issue and just havent had a chance to get around to sorting it out...for some reason the earth leakage unit in my house would trip for no apparent reason...i would just reset the unit and walla the power is back on...no need to drop the circuit breakers to identify the circuit causing a problem...then my office/workshop earth leakage started tripping for no apparent reason.

a couple days ago i reset the e/l unit...the lights started to flicker...huh ...now i am confused...e/l unit stayed up...went out to the workshop checked the e/l unit ...it hadnt tripped.

switch everything off and reset...got the multi meter out and checked the voltage...230 volts L-N and L-E ...no problem...yet all the lights i switched on in the house were flickering...a couple minutes later it stopped...i always tell my customers...if they notice the lights flickering...call the electricity department and report a fault...there is a good chance the neutral has a bad connection and is about to break...so i decided to take a walk outside and check the pole connection...an easy problem to detect...the pole was on fire

So we call the electricity department and report the pole on fire...i am told they will attend to it within 24 hours...the response i expected...and as we know from previous fires ...it doesnt help calling the Durban fire department because they dont have a direct link to the electricity department (of all the dumb things i have heard) where we had 3 fire engines with 10 firemen sitting waiting 3 hours waiting for someone to try get hold of the electricity department to get them to switch off the power so we could isolate the power to put out the fire.

Eventually the fire burnt out and power was restored later that day.

The good news...i havent had an e/l unit trip since...something to check the next time you have a random tripping e/l unit.