Believe it or not this is quite a common situation. My lights are working but my sockets are not.

How does this happen?

When do you go to your fuse board you will notice that there should be separate fuses. These fuses are there to protect the cabling and the circuitry but more importantly, you.

Each fuse in your fuse board protects a different circuit. You should notice on your fuse board that you have labels that state something along the lines of – sockets ground, sockets up, lighting ground, lighting up.

Now for the problem that we have. Your plug sockets aren’t working.

Short brief troubleshooting for this.

1. Locate the fuse board.
2. Check the circuit Breakers and see which one is off.
3. Try to turn it back on

NOW: It may have come back on. Why? Because you have experienced something called nuisance tripping. This can be caused by what we call “earth leakage” making your device think there is a fault.

HOWEVER! If the circuit still hasn’t come back on, follow on

• On the affected circuit make sure everything is unplugged (not just turned off, come on, don’t be lazy)
• Go back to the fuse board and try to turn the circuit on again

IF at this point it still doesn’t come on, call an electrician (I wonder where you can find one of those in Watford?)

If the power does come on, don’t celebrate just yet, we still have more work to do.

• Plug in each appliance ONE BY ONE (this is not a race)

One appliance you plug back in SHOULD make the circuit breaker trip again. If so, unplug the defective accessory and throw it in the bin! If none of the appliances trip the circuit breaker again, it could also be seen as nuisance tripping. Most times you can narrow it down to anything with a motor or old lamps where the bulbs get too hot.

Anyway, you should be back up and running now and able to carry on your day with fully working electrics. If you find this happening frequently it may be worth looking at getting an EICR (Electrical Installation Condition Report) from an NICEIC registered electrician to make sure there are no underlying problems with your wiring.