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The mkiv Supra Owners Club

Domestic wiring question for any sparkies on here


stevie_b

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My house was built in the early 1970s and has grey-insulated single core flex in the loft for the lighting circuit. What I'm trying to do is splice into the upstairs lighting circuit to install 2 or 3 new lights. In the places I've dug the wiring out from the insulation it's buried in, there are 5 single-core grey cables. That strikes me as a very odd number. Is this common, and if so can anyone tell me what the wires are likely to do? (e.g. are they 2 live and 3 neutral, and what circuits (upstairs or downstairs?) are they likely to be supplying?). I appreciate this is next to impossible if what I describe isn't a standard set-up, but the wiring looks fairly original, and if I'm right there must be hundreds of thousands of lofts in the UK with wiring just like mine.

 

 

A bit of background: I've already successfully spliced into the lighting circuit to extend it for the new light fittings I wanted. This worked fine until I changed my consumer unit from an old fuse-wire type one to an RCD board. My new lights trip out whenever any one of them is turned on, and I'm pretty sure it's because I've accidentally used a borrowed neutral (i.e. using the live from the upstairs circuit and the neutral from the downstairs) when I did the splice.

 

The only reason I can think of for there being downstairs wiring in the loft is for the landing light: even so, I don't understand how the landing light wiring avoids the borrowed neutral problem.

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