I have just spent a day messing with the cooker wiring in our house . Its 19 years old, and the cooker stopped working just before Christmas. On investigation : Despite having a 4mm2 cable, directly routed from the distribution board to the wall outlet, the cooker is actually a 3kW cooker and it is actually connected via a 13 amp flex and standard mains plug. If you plug the cooker into the hob socket adjacent ( spur off a ring main , only powers ignitor circuit on a gas hob), the cooker actually works. There is no continuity on the neutral wire of the cooker circuit. When I started checking , the neutral wire was also at 240volts from earth if the cooker was connected. Further poking. The neutral wire is broken between the wall outlet and the distribution board. There is no short to earth. There is no damage visible to the wire near either end. I originally thought I had drilled through the wiring fitting an overflow pipe for a water softener a few years back , but after removing the water softener, and cutting through the plasterboard to look, I found nothing amiss - yes I had whacked a cable with the drill (smacked into the edge of the trunking) but it had been pushed out of the way , this cable is the spur for the washing machine. No insulation damage . Estimating by a capacitance meter, it looks like the break is about 25% of the distance from the distribution board to the wall outlet - live to neutral is 750pF at the cooker end, about 250pF at the distribution board. This puts the problem above the ceiling somewhere in the hallway or kitchen. But I aint touched nothing. In the end I decided to plug the cooker into the hob socket - as its only 13A, disconnect and mark the wiring at the distribution board end, and write on the wall by the cooker socket behind the cooker. I give up.
Sounds like it’s time to get the floor boards up or just re wire it. sometimes it can be a floorboard nail that takes time to rub through.
I will have to do that as well! Great way to get the missus winter camping! Sent from my MotoG3 using Tapatalk
I hope not any vermin. The nail theory seems best but for now we have decided just to disconnect the cooker wiring from the distribution box. We dont have floorboards we have MDF sheets. I wish I had taken pictures when we toured a half built house shell while all the wiring and plumbing were visible so I knew where all the cables were run.
