Dead circuit, breakers all good

Ook · 2007-03-01T23:54:14+00:00

I have lost an entire circuit - 6 dead outlets, 2 dead switches, all along one set of walls. All of the breakers are good, I even tested the wires coming out of the breakers to make sure they were hot (wife bought me a nifty no contact bells and whistles dvm :) ), and all it tells me is that all of the hot wires are really hot. There are no wires running to the area in the basement, and the attic is open and I don't see any wires there either. I'm not really sure where the circuit is fed from, and tearing out walls isn't an option. Any suggestions on how to find where the wire that feeds the circuit comes from? Are there any devices that can detect wires behind sheetrock, or otherwise allow you to trace wires without tearing the wall apart? This should not be difficult, but so far I've got a dead circuit and no idea where it gets fed from.

Mar 01, 2007 22 Replies

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Ook 19 years ago

I did - immediately. End of problem :-)

I'm not opposed to having the circuit protected by a GFCI, but having the GFCI outside the house is just wrong. You should not take out the front room and half a bedroom when your christmas tree lights trip the GFCI. If I had a chance to do it myself, I would have put all outslide lights and outlets on their own circuit, instead of mixing them like it currently is. For $.10, I'd rewire the house myself and do it my way. Get rid of some of the spaghetti wiring, add a few more circuits, design it a bit better.

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John McGaw 19 years ago

Well, it makes me feel better than my reply contained:

"Oh, and one other thing I just though of: if you have any GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupters) in your house, check each of them. I actually found a house once where someone looking for a convenient source of power tapped off of a GFCI in a bathroom and fed it to the lights and ceiling fans in two adjacent bedrooms. It took a lot of head scratching to finally figure out than a tripped GFCI killed the power."

Sometimes you just gotta' get it right (even if you do misspell "thought".

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Ook 19 years ago

Yeah, I actually went back and found your original message yesterday, talking about the GFCI. I found it rather humurous that what you described a week ago is *exactly* what I found.

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