This study presents an earth fault distance determination algorithm for distribution networks using active travelling waves. Three triacs are used in parallel with a three-phase breaker poles to overcome the mechanical inequality of the poles' reclosing times, so that the three phases are simultaneously reclosed. As the proposed fault location technique is an active type with controllable reclosing instant, the arrival time of the reflected surge from the fault point should be stamped precisely. For this purpose, three different travellingwave detection algorithms are evaluated including the discrete wavelet transform, Hilbert transform, and signal derivative. The fault location performance is evaluated under different fault conditions such as fault distances, fault resistances, and busbar faults. Due to utilising the reclosing transients, the proposed fault location function successfully estimates the fault distance for different earthing concepts such as unearthed, compensated, and earthed networks. This study is accomplished via simulating a typical 20 kV distribution network by the ATP/EMTP program. The results ensure the superior performance of the proposed fault distance estimation algorithm for earth faults in distribution networks. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.