Light BulbsĬompact fluorescent bulbs (spiral looking) may last longer, but they die a slow death, running rather dim during their last years. 1.) You can get shocked at a light or outlet that is not working 2.) You can get confused when your tester finds live white wires 3.) You don't know where the problem is being caused 4.) Only in the case of an open on a shared neutral (rarer), you may see damage to appliances and/or odd effects in the behavior of your lights. 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.Īn open neutral is a loose white wire along a circuit. Knowing what the circuit consists of is another matter. The other 50% of the time, it will be at the first non-working item. 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. This is from a poor connection (an "open") along the circuit. Finding the bad spot is trickier than resetting a breaker.Ī common difficulty for which people contact me is an outage on one circuit that is not due to a tripped breaker or GFI. And sometimes this kind of outage can be temporary. Very few are aware of how part of a circuit can go dead from a poor connection. The first thought most of us have when there is a circuit outage, is that a circuit breaker tripped off. Most of a circuit can stop working even when the breaker is on and is fine. Also, water can get to a cord's prongs wherever one cord plugs into another. Why is a GFCI tripping holiday lights off? Be sure the lights and their cords are not held in wet places, like beauty bark or the ground (anywhere they can't shed water). Most often, one GFCI receptacle will be providing this protection to a number of standard receptacles (in required locations) fed from it. And it is only the protection, not a GFCI-type receptacle, that must exist there. Actually the Code says nothing about water - it just tells what areas of a home must have GFCI protection. It is commonly said that GFCI outlets are required near water. GFI outlets nowadays won't allow you to reset them if the power to them is off. 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. GFCIs (GFIs)Ī normal receptacle is sometimes ground-fault protected from elsewhere.Ī GFCI receptacle will not trip for an overload.Ī GFCI rarely trips from a defect in it. 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. In some cases a circuit breaker will trip off only after the circuit has been running things for several minutes. And if your problem would make sense from their tripping but they DIDN'T, something other than them is probably at fault. GFIs and breakers are not usually the bad guy - they trip for a reason. Did You Know? Circuit Breakers & TrippingĪ circuit breaker can appear to be on, but really be tripped.Ī breaker trips much more often for a real short than from some defect in itself.
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