This is a cooker connection I was doing an inspection and got no earth continuity to the exposed metal . Wonder why ????????????
The terminal marked N is actually the earth the unmarked one is neutral. If you look close you can see the earth tab coming from the N. The person who originally wired it did not notice this and as it was not on an rcd protected circuit it went unnoticed.
Clearly its not idiot proof clear.. but it looks fine to me.. Earth terminal has the symbol stamped next to it and the tab comes out the bottom, L is marked and obviously the one left is N. It does take a moment to double check, an example of someone who thinks there right rather then actually checking they are..
I had a similar one yesterday, just like you to connect this new hob he said. He'd tried to do it himself but couldn't work out the connections. It was one of those with 3 live connections and 2 link plates, one of which he'd lost! No markings for L-N-E, live was easy as there was one link plate still in place, so I made a link from a piece of wire then metered the one I suspected was earth, which it was so all was well.
They wired it L live N neutral and put the earth in the middle ....... Switch on and away it went and ran like that for 8 years
I came across that on a c/unit change a few years ago, just packed all my tools etc. in the car and customer came running out saying it's all gone off. After "interrogating" her for a while she told me she'd switched a table lamp on in the dining room, on checking the plug I found the neutral wire was connected to the earth pin!
It would have been your fault though sen ........... It wasn't like that before, it worked fine before you messed with it, well its been plugged in for years .....this has never happened before
Used to get far more of that when I was a t/v engineer Eric. Fix a totally dead set and then get a phone call next day saying something like, the itv picture is terrible since you came to repair the set. Try to explain to them that their aerial signal is poor their response would be, "but it's always been ok before"! Or after getting the set working other totally unrelated faults would be present but of course "it was never like that before"! Customers eh, who needs em !!
We all have it sen I did a rewire a while ago I was called back as there was a leak I went upstairs to see a wet patch on his carpet. I explained that due to the law of physics gravity would cause the water to go down and not up, I patted about a bit I niffed my fingers then announced to him that this was P*SS. His hound had found a new bog.