Vadaam Home Repairs A plumber, an electrician and a carpenter, dispatched across Male and Hulhumale

A breaker that trips is telling you the truth

The most dangerous repair in a home is the cheapest one: fitting a bigger breaker so it stops interrupting you.

Somebody telephones about once a fortnight to ask us to fit a larger breaker because the small one keeps cutting out when the kettle and the iron are on together. We say no, and it is worth explaining why properly rather than just refusing.

A breaker is not a switch that is being awkward. It is a deliberately weak link, sized to the cable behind it. A cable has a maximum current it can carry without getting hot, and the breaker is chosen to open before the cable reaches it. Fit a bigger breaker and the cable is still the same cable. The weak link is now the wire inside your wall, and a wire's way of interrupting a circuit is to get hot enough to set fire to whatever is around it.

So the question is never which breaker. It is why the circuit is drawing more than it was built for. Almost always it is one of four things. Too much on one circuit, which is a real problem and the answer is another circuit, not a bigger breaker. A faulty appliance, which shows up in ten minutes with a clamp meter. Damp in a socket or a junction, which is common here and which trips an earth leakage device rather than an overload one. Or a nail through a cable, usually from a shelf put up years ago.

The test comes first, every time, and the visit is four hundred rufiyaa whether the answer takes ten minutes or the full hour. About a third of them turn out to be a single appliance, most often a water heater element beginning to leak to earth, and the customer keeps the breaker they already had.

The one we never forget: a flat where the breaker had been replaced twice by two different people, each with a bigger one. The cable behind the kitchen wall had already discoloured the plaster. Nobody had done anything malicious; everybody had done the thing the customer asked for.