21/08/2026
When an electrical fault only happens occasionally, the smallest detail you notice can make a big difference.
We recently attended a property in Tiverton to investigate an RCD that had been tripping intermittently.
The difficulty with intermittent faults is that everything can be working perfectly normally by the time we arrive. That’s why one of the first things we want to understand is what the customer has noticed.
In this case, there was a pattern.
The customer told us the RCD seemed to trip roughly every other day when the dishwasher was being used.
They didn’t need to know why it was happening. That simple observation gave us somewhere useful to start.
We ran the dishwasher on a rapid cycle and watched what happened. Initially, everything operated normally. Then the dishwasher reached the stage where the pump started emptying the sump.
The RCD tripped.
We had successfully reproduced the intermittent fault and, importantly, narrowed the investigation down to a particular appliance and stage of its operation.
That’s valuable evidence. It doesn’t, by itself, prove exactly which component is ultimately responsible – but it gives us a much clearer direction for the next stage of fault finding.
Good fault finding isn’t about guessing or immediately replacing parts. It’s about gathering evidence, reproducing the problem where possible and gradually narrowing down the possibilities.
So if you’ve got an intermittent electrical problem, tell your electrician everything you’ve noticed – when it happens, what’s running and whether there’s a pattern.
You don’t need to diagnose the fault yourself. Sometimes the information you provide is one of the most useful diagnostic tools we have.