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What caused electronic devices to blow

fitzie79 · 2011-04-08 07:17:44

Last weekend whilst working on the main fuse board myself and my dad (electrician) inadvertently shorted the live and neutral wires going to the solar pump. We had a problem with the temperature reading on the solar panel fluctuating continuously and occasionally spiking up to > 100oC even when there was no sunshine. We…

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08-04-2011 8:17am

#1

fitzie79

Registered Users Posts: 350 ✭✭

Join Date: January 2006

Posts: 241

Last weekend whilst working on the main fuse board myself and my dad (electrician) inadvertently shorted the live and neutral wires going to the solar pump. We had a problem with the temperature reading on the solar panel fluctuating continuously and occasionally spiking up to > 100oC even when there was no sunshine. We were looking for loose connections to see if this was the problem but the guy who had installed the system (since gone bust so that's why we were trying to fix it ourselves) had left a loose strand of wire sticking out of the neutral terminal that shorted to the live wire when we took off the cover. (Still haven't resolved this issue so if anyone has ideas on what could be wrong with this it would be appreciated!)

This short blew a relay in the solar control panel. However, it also caused a phone charger in a bedroom at the other end of the house to blow, the receiver for the heating control thermostats to blow and even sent a surge down to the electric gates and burned out a fuse at the control panel for the gates. The MCB on each of these circuits tripped but not in time to prevent the surge getting through.

My understanding is that in order for the electronic components to have been blown there must have been a voltage spike? However, I can't figure out what caused the spike above the normal 230V AC level? Could it have been the inductive load of the pump somehow caused the high voltage or does anyone have any other ideas as to what could have happened?

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