How To Turn Off Electricity Making Your Home Safe

WARNING: The following instructions must be used with common sense and reasonable safety measures to avoid personal injuries - reasonable safety should always come first, but if you'd like more information, please visit http://www.videojug.com/terms/terms.

Hi there. I'm Chris from Aspect Maintenance, an electrical company based in the city of London. Today we're just going to have a brief look at the RCD protective distribution board within the house, usually found under the stairs or at the front door.

Some of the issues that you will sometimes have to deal with is obviously if something trips one of the MCB's will go, it's just a case of flicking it straight back up. As long as it resets the chances are that there isn't a problem with your circuit. If you keep turning it up and it keeps dropping down that's telling you that there is definitely something wrong, something plugged in, or a fault in the current.

Here as well we have the RCD, which if you press the test button will trip out all the circuits, as such. So that lets you know that it's working. If that didn't happen it wasn't working, and then just reset it again so all the circuits are fine.

And with any distribution board you should obviously have some of the warning notices and obviously every circuit labelled, so lights, sockets, cooker, central heating and that's basically just your domestic distribution board. Sometimes within the domestic house you'll need to turn some stuff off, maybe it's for some maintenance issues or anything like that. You want to follow the safe isolation procedure which is obviously come to the circuit, test the circuit first that you want to turn, let's use a socket for an example.

Test the socket so you know its live then come to the distribution board, find the socket circuit that you want to switch off. Switch it off, lock it off using one of the circuits, depending on the brand there will be different lock offs that you can use or a bit of tape or just whatever, so that nobody can come and push it all about knowing that you're working on that circuit. Go back, retest the component, retest the double socket, and then you can then begin work on it.

And that's just some advice when you dealing with a distribution board within a domestic household.