Is electrical troubleshooting for a home simple? Sometimes Yes. Sometimes No. If you read this site thoroughly, you will realize that more is involved than other sites suggest. And you may wonder if it is more than you want to deal with. But if your careful reading brings you increased understanding, then you are more equipped to deal with the possibilities.
The bulk of home electrical wiring problems can be divided into three classes: Outright mistakes in installation or connection. Inferior connectings. Inferior materials.
A circuit breaker can appear to be on, but really be tripped.
The voltage in half of all U.S. homes is greater than most light bulbs are designed to run on.
Why do your dimmer switches burn out? Light bulb quality seems to be declining, and I am thinking that this has increased the frequency with which a light bulb will set up a shorting arc when IT burns out. Any short going through a dimmer has a fair chance of killing it. Consider replacing that burned out dimmer with a normal switch.
Compact fluorescent bulbs (spiral looking) may last longer, but they die a slow death, running rather dim during their last years. Incandescent bulbs at least let you know when to replace them.
Congress says that by 2014 normal 40-100 watt incandescent light bulbs must no longer be made (to encourage the more efficient fluorescent bulbs). Remember when your dimmer switches were promoted as saving energy? Guess what? Those dimmers are not able to get along with most fluorescent bulbs! You may be going back to regular on-off switches.
A normal receptacle is sometimes ground-fault protected from elsewhere.
Home electricity doesn’t flow in one constant direction.
A turned-on dimmer switch normally produces some heat.
Most of a circuit can stop working even when the breaker is on and is fine.
A common difficulty for which people contact me is an outage on one circuit that is not due to a tripped breaker or GFI. This is from a poor connection (an "open") along the circuit. Most people don't realize that there is a 50% chance that the bad spot is located at the last still-working item along the circuit. The other 50% of the time, it will be at the first non-working item. Knowing what the circuit consists of is another matter.
A GFCI receptacle will not trip for an overload.
When on their high setting, hair dryers sold today use the entire capacity of a 15-amp circuit.
The more that new safety devices are required, the more home electrical wiring problems there will be because of this.
Replacing a switch or receptacle can open a can of worms.
A breaker trips much more often for a real short than from some defect in itself.
A GFCI rarely trips from a defect in it. Usually a GFI trips from being miswired or from a fault in something that is plugged into it or into a regular outlet protected by it.
GFIs and breakers are not usually the bad guy - they trip for a reason. And if your problem would make sense from their tripping but they DIDN'T, something other than them is probably at fault.
If you lose power to much of a circuit, the first of the dead things may have the poor connection, but it is equally likely that the last of the working things has a wire poorly connected from it.
GFI outlets nowadays won’t allow you to reset them if the power to them is off.
In some cases a circuit breaker will trip off only after the circuit has been running things for several minutes. This may not be from an overload but from a poor connection point at, or in, the breaker itself, which develops heat that fools the breaker.
The first thought most of us have when there is a circuit outage, is that a circuit breaker tripped off. Very few are aware of how part of a circuit can go dead from a poor connection. And sometimes this kind of outage can be temporary. Finding the bad spot is trickier than resetting a breaker.
Upgrading an electrical panel to greater space or current-capacity does nothing (by itself) to alleviate the overloading of a particular circuit.
Three assumptions that can be wrong: The breaker is responsible for things on a circuit being dead. The loose connection along a circuit will be found at one of the circuit’s dead items. You can’t get shocked at an outlet that doesn’t work.
Should you be afraid of overloading your circuits? Should you be afraid of overloading your circuits? Generally not, because you have circuit breakers! They stop overloads in their tracks by tripping the circuit off before a load gets "over". Still, you might say, we can't tell when some trusted electrical component might be faulty and overheat. True, but that is an unexpected "undercapacity", not an overloading on your part. The main exception to this is the overloading of light fixtures or extension cords, not whole circuits. These state the maximum wattages they are to serve and do not usually have built-in trip-offs. So pay attention with those. But don't worry about using your circuits. Life is too short.
Certainly, many home electrical wiring problems come from homeowners DIYing, but when the populace is kept ignorant and kept away from practical knowledge of their own property, this can be expected. If doing it yourself were encouraged more, I think the level of your competence would increase.
Perhaps the most common search bringing people here amounts to: why won’t my usual resetting procedures restore power. That expresses a lot of different situations, so I can’t give a single answer. But if you are willing to learn a little more here about how your system of circuits works, I think you’ll have a better chance of handling your problem.
When part of a circuit goes dead due to an open neutral, people testing their wires are surprised to find white wires registering hot (live). An outlet tester calls the condition "hot and ground reversed", but what is really happening is this. Somewhere among the non-working items, a turned-on one lets hotness through its resistance but since it no longer has a path or connection back to the panel (the usual neutral), those whites still show hotness (ready to shock you in fact!).
There are three things people imagine, which I have yet to come across: A breaker that trips on its own from mechanical weakness. A person who can testify that they were being shocked and then a GFI tripped and saved them. Signs that a rodent has chewed on housewire for fun or for the taste of it. But I’m willing to be convinced. [I did recently hear that rodents which have been poisoned will chew on things randomly; do any of you know if this is true?].
What Is Troubleshooting? Troubleshooting is not improving or upgrading things that work. Troubleshooting is not even looking for possible trouble -- that's prevention. The common notion is exact and right: troubleshooting is shooting in the direction of a real glitch till you have flushed it out where you can shoot it dead.
The resistance of an incandescent light bulb filament is very much less when measured with power off than when carrying its current.
What are people’s three worst fears about their home wiring? First, that something will go wrong with the wires back in the wall, where it’s hard to know about or do something about. Second, that it will have been caused by a malicious chewing varmint. And third, that this is sure to start a fire. Each of these scenarios by itself is rare. Imagine how rare they are together. Most problems live safely and conveniently within the electrical boxes that are required.
HOME© 2006 Larry Dimock