life on the wand

Joyce called me at work on Thursday and announced that several of the outside and garage outlets on our house weren't working. She looked for tripped breakers or GFCI's but none were tripped. So, today I did some investigation and decided that the problem was a bad connection somewhere in the middle of one of the circuits. I guessed that all the bad outlets (three of them) were on the same circuit, and ended up taking the boxes apart and disconnecting all the wires so I could trace the wiring from outlet to outlet. Amazingly, the circuit goes from an outlet in the garage (the last working one in the circuit), to one outside the front door, back to another outlet in the garage, and then to an outlet outside the back door. I found the bad connection once I knew which outlet was bad. If you look carefully at the picture below, you can see that the neutral (white) wire looks a bit burnt on the copper. That is because the electrician that wired this house didn't believe in tightening the screws enough. This is the second (or third?) time a loose wire has caused problems since we bought this house 15 months ago.


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