Good news and bad news

I spent most of today wrestling with my house’s electrical problems so ended up not painting the kitchen. I wasn’t too worried about that, however, as it won’t take long to do the kitchen and the electrical problems are a much higher priority. I started by phoning Enedis to arrange for their technician to return to make the house’s permanent connection to the electrical supply.

What I heard surprised and made me a bit angry. I was told that that wouldn’t be necessary as my house was already connected after yesterday’s visit and that for the time being I had two connections (permanent for the house, temporary for the caravan) and this would continue until I ask for the temporary one to be disconnected. So the information I’d been fed by the electrician and Didier about the house being on an ’emergency’ low power connection was a load of rubbish.

So that freed me up to go and start making my own investigation into what’s going on. The main issues are to do with the lighting and here’s where things could begin to get a bit tricky. The builder proposed the usual hanging type of light fittings throughout the whole house which I rejected because I wanted LED spots everywhere. I paid extra for the electrician to run the cabling and drill the holes in the ceiling to take them but because there are 43 of them I decided to wire them up and install them myself.

Clearly if I’ve done something silly and somehow mis-wired one or more there could be problems that could well prevent the system from working correctly and there have already been rumblings along those lines. If it could be shown that the problems were down to me, or even just might be, it would be convenient for both the electrician and the builder for whom he was working as I’d end up paying and not them. My being confident that I hadn’t made any errors would not be enough.

Enedis had told me that I could go ahead and turn on all the breakers on my panel as the system should be fully up and running, so that’s what I intended to do. The first thing I noticed was that the night before I’d left the circuits for the lighting that I’d found to be working on but now they had popped off, which in itself was a bit suspicious. I then checked the hob unit by turning one hot plate on and it worked but while I was doing so the circuit for the corridor and bedroom lighting popped off again.

Whatever I did I still couldn’t get any lighting to work in the main living room area though, although the four spots in the dining area were fine and have never given any problems right from the outset. Also the bathroom lighting was solid but I couldn’t get the two spots in the separate toilet to come on so this still left the possibility that I might have messed up when wiring up one or more spots.

At that point I decided to get some lunch and as I needed to do a bit of shopping as well I thought that I’d pick up some bulbs to see if there were any problems with the exterior lights which so far I hadn’t checked at all. Carrefour are selling 6 watt LEDs that they say are equivalent to old-style 60 watt bulbs for only 1.72€ each, a snip at that price, so I thought that I’d just start by buying a couple (I need 6) to see how they perform and whether they are bright enough. When I got back I returned to seeing what I could then find out about the problems.

Before lunch I’d switched the breaker off that serves the living room lighting because it was causing a loud buzzing sound to come from the breaker box. I started by switching all the lighting breakers on including the living room one and noticed immediately that there was no buzzing. When I went into the living room I found that all of the spots that previously wouldn’t turn on were all shining brightly.

There was only one problem. Neither of the switches installed by the electrician would switch them off and the only way to do so was by switching off the breaker at the breaker box. I then realised that there’s a fault detection knob and depending on how I set that I could make the living room lights come on at will, although I still could only turn them off at the breaker box. This is bad news, you might say, but I say it’s far from it.

The fact that ALL of the spots that I wired in can be shown to be operative means that NONE of the lighting faults are down to me or some error I might have made. They are due to faults or errors in cabling due to the work of the electrician whose job it will be to come back and sort them out. He needs to come back to check the system anyway as only now is it connected to power and not to do so would be like a garage fitting a new engine in a customer’s car and handing it back to him without running, or even starting it.

The bedroom and corridor lighting breaker is in the same breaker set as a couple of plug socket circuits and its popping off only seems to happen when the plug socket breakers are left on. So there appears to be another problem there, and as a footnote, I don’t think the two spots in the separate toilet have been connected at all, as with all of the lighting breakers on and the lounge spots working they show no signs of life whatsoever.

But what about the exterior lights? Like I said, I only bought two bulbs one of which I wanted to put in the porch because that’s on the same circuit as the living room spots. Here are some shots that I took as it was getting dark.

Obviously I’m still far from having the problems sorted and I’ve asked for the electrician to return as soon as possible to deal with the growing list of issues. I think that the living room problem is due to the switches that have been installed which I think are incorrect – or one of them at least, anyway. But all of this stuff is not helping me get the house ready to move into and yet another serious issue has also reared its head which I’ll go into in another post 🙁