my stove was not on earth leakage, heard from most electricians that there is no need, like Vassen, for safety's sake, with all that metal exposed to people, i put an earth leakage on the stove circuit

The 2nd picture show how it should be, it would seem to me.

Reading some of the comments, it seems a lot of people don't understand how the Earth Leakage switch functions. Case in point was Tariq and his oven. basically Neutral should be bonded to earth on the Municipal/Eskom side and even in the house.

The Earth Leakage aka GFI (Ground Fault Interruptor) determines if there an imbalance between Neutral and Live, in terms of the current flowing through the wiring. Your oven's chassis, for instance should be connected to earth (all that metal exposed) so it should never get to be live, since that would imply live and neutral (being bonded to earth) shorting out.

If you touch the live wire in some way, your body would be coupled to earth, even if capacitively coupled and there should be short term enough of an imbalance between live and neutral to cause the Earth Leakage to trip.

Don't know about today, but traditionally lights didn't require connection to Earth Leakage and neither did computer equipment, but usually they wanted a different socket installed for the non-Earth Leakage connected power sockets (the ground pin flattened at the top, so its not 100% round) so normal equipment couldn't be connected to these.

Certainly a Hot water cylinder's element should be running via the Earth Leakage switch, think shower and something going wong... but since most water piping these days seems to be plastic, you'd need salt water to cause a problem, possibly 🙂

@Kalahari Meerkat, not sure I understand, are you saying that the stove should NOT be on earth leakage, if so, then, yes, I do not know how earth leakage works

@Tariq, if I remember back in the day, an oven need not be on earth leakage, but I could be wrong, since I'm not an electrician. The point being, though that all that exposed metal on your oven should be connected to earth and if live should, due to a fault of sorts, connect to all that metal, then the earth leakage should trip immediately, since earth should also be bonded to neutral at the entrance to your main db, before the earth leakage switch. Which pretty much implies that live and neutral just caused a major power spike and increased your power consumption temporarily until either the circuit breaker tripped due to the fault causing a current surge or if you do have the oven on the earth leakage that should have tripped before too much power got consumed, since power would have run through the live cable and before the earth leakage, where earth and neutral are bonded, the earth would have passed the current through to neutral, causing the imbalance in the earth leakage which would cause it to trip.

Earth leakage trips when there is an imbalance between the live and neutral wires in terms of the current flow at worst case scenario at the rated 20mA or whatever your earth leakage is rated at.

 

Yes, neutral and earth are bonded right where the supply comes into the house, i have now seen where a stove will have a sticker on it that mentions NOT installing the stove on earth leakage as the moisture and liquid spills can cause nuisance tripping, since I don’t have that problem, from what I seem to gather from your post, that connecting a stove to eart leakage is a good idea ??

I hope you aren't paying for these repairs.  It is obvious the previous tenant messed up the DB.  You aren't allowed to rent out a house that isn't complaint so the landlord has no choice but to fix it.  Whether or not the landlord wishes to claim from the previous tenant is his choice.

Also, I know you had an electrician over but I assume you have a double poll breaker for the main switch now? (not just the earth leakage)

It is a legal requirement that single phase installations should be isolated with a double poll breaker.

Edited February 10, 20215 yr by Gnome