Electric leak, advice needed

[Horace42]

3 hours ago, ditchcrawler said:

Not the whole cable, just live and neutral  then if you have 3 amps flowing in. 0,03 flowing to earth you end up with2.97 in the neutral and if you have a £500 clamp meter you measure 0.03 amps. As I said he is going to have to take things to bits to carry out the measurement if he has the right equipment

Thanks.  yes an imbalance between line and neutral means earth leakage, and thinking about, if the clamp went round all 3 wires the current in the earth wire would cancel out - and a zero reading would be obtained. Obviously a test of not much use. But it has been said the earth wire current is zero. So how was it known, unless tested separately.

Which was on my mind when I commented on the time scale of the test allowing errors to creep.

Apart from sensitivity of the meter needed for low values to be measured accurately, from which it could be argued that someone would not pay £500 for a decent meter. unless be a specialist. and would know what they were doing. 

Leading to my observation that if the blacking itself was at fault (but blamed on electrics) might be due to using an expert electrician with little painting knowledge doing a bit of blacking as a spare time job....

 

[Sea Dog]

6 hours ago, Horace42 said:

...

Leading to my observation that if the blacking itself was at fault (but blamed on electrics) might be due to using an expert electrician with little painting knowledge doing a bit of blacking as a spare time job....

 

 

Yep, that's certainly where my first thoughts led me...

 

On 22/10/2018 at 21:01, Sea Dog said:

... I suspect very few folk slapping bitumen on narrowboat bottoms are the right ones to make such an assessment. 

 

 

However, I don't think it matters much as the OP appears to have gone.  The boat might just ax well have been sold by now, perhaps to a buyer who got a healthy reduction to compensate for something quite spurious.

Edited October 29, 2018 by Sea Dog
However... whilst I checked