Why does my electricity keep tripping?
A trip is protection working: something is leaking current or overloading a circuit. The commonest culprit is a failing appliance, which you can find yourself by unplugging everything on the circuit and reintroducing one at a time. If the circuit trips with nothing plugged in, or trips instantly on reset, stop resetting and book fault-finding: each reset pushes fault current through damage.
The free diagnostic every household should know: identify what died with the trip (that names the circuit), unplug every appliance on it, reset, and reintroduce appliances one at a time. When the trip repeats, you are holding the culprit. Kettles, washing machines, tumble driers, cheap chargers and anything that lives outdoors head the league table.
Moisture is the second great tripper: outdoor sockets after rain, garden equipment, a leak reaching a ceiling rose. These often show as a trip that resets fine in dry weather and returns with the rain, a pattern worth mentioning when you book because it halves the search.
The patterns that mean stop: a circuit that trips the instant you reset it (a hard fault, and repeated resets cook the damage), a trip accompanied by any burning smell or scorch, or the main switch tripping rather than one circuit. Leave the circuit off; everything else in the house still works, and the fault-finding visit is a systematic hour rather than an emergency.
One more honest possibility: on older boards a single shared RCD can nuisance-trip from the accumulated leakage of many healthy appliances. The fix there is not tolerating it but splitting protection per circuit with RCBOs, after which trips return to meaning something.
More in rewiring & fuse boxes, or browse all 40 questions on the FAQ index.
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