50 volts between nuetral & earth - Lighting/ fluescents

[captaincaveman]

Hello beautiful people.
Quick one for anyone who may have an idea:

Attended job today with a room with 2x 5ft fluescents not working and found 50v between N-E. I did basic tests on the fittings (continuity, ir, etc) - all ok. main earth and everything else ok.

Checked the light nearest the non-working lights and found 4x 2ft fluescents going into junction box with all their polarities reversed going into the junction box - how someone could do that i don't know.
I corrected them (adding appropriate sheafs to switch conductors etc, grrr) which got the fluescent lights working again with no N-E voltage.

My quiry is tho, assuming the polarity issue was historic, if the fluescents were working before then why did they just both stop like that and then start working as soon as I corrected the polarity? and why didn't the 2 ft ones stop working?

I feel like I've missed something such as a loose connection which I've corrected while stomping about or something. It'll probably click soon as my head hits the pillow. always does lol!

 

[westward10]

Maybe you corrected a lose connection without realising. They should have operated polarity correct or not.

 

[Deleted member 9648]

Probably a high resistance neutral connection in the junctionbox which you have unknowingly corrected.You would see a voltage appear on the neutral wire at the lights,which in effect was not a neutral....it was a conductor connected to a line conductor through the light and going nowhere until the bad connection is rectified.