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Does anyone know anything about electrical wiring in a home?
We own a fairly new home (3 years old), and several months ago the master bedroom lights all weren't working (the outlets etc.,). The other week I forgot about the outlets and plugged in a vacuum cleaner in the room and low and behold all the outlets started working again! Sadly, yesterday when I got home, they were out again, and so I thought: "hmmm, I wonder if I could bring it back?" sure enough I plugged in the vacuum cleaner and the electricity started working again, BUT this time it only came back for no more than a minute...ugh. We bought this house thinking it was NEW and PERFECT! Boy have we been wrong! Please give me any info. or thoughts that you have on this moronic problem.
Answer:
Hi, Lynn. Hope I can help. Yes, electrical problems can be maddening. Unfortunately, they can also be quite dangerous, fire being one of the dangers. If you have any doubts about whether or not you can handle the problem yourself, please hire a licensed electrician to help. I am not one nor do I work for any electrical concern, but I have wired several of my own houses and have dealt with such homeowner problems for over forty years. That said, let's see if I can help you locate and fix the problem.
Form the descriptiion of your actions, I suspect that one of the wires, probaly a white one, has come loose inside the box that that holds the recepticle you plugged your vacuum into. There could be several sets of wires behind the actual plug-in in that box. Each set is tied together with a plastic twist-on gadget called a wire nut. Chances are that one or more of the wires have come loose. To check it, you first will have to go to your main electric panel and flip off the circuit breaker that feeds electridity to the set of outlets where the trouble is located. If you can't find it, you should get a neighbor of friend to help. Reaching into the outlet box without the breaker being off could lead to electrical shock and/or a damaging short circuit. Okay. Assuming you have switched the correct breaker to the off position, you can now handle the wires behind the outlet where the trouble seems to be located. Check the wires that enter each of the wire nuts. White wires go together with the exposed copper tip of each touching the others...the wire nut is designed to make that happen. It just trwists on. The black wires do the same, but these are the hot ones. Be careful. The green ones twist onto a bare copper one. They are safe. DO NOT CONNECT UNMATCHING COLORS TO EACH OTHER. If you find what looks like might have fixed the problem, put the socket back in, leave the cover off, and switch the electricity back on at the breaker panel. Next, check to see if the circuit works by plugging in a lamp, or some other appliance. If it still does not work, do the drill again with the next non-working plug-in. Good luck, and once again, if you do not feel competent to attempt this, get some professional help. One source might be the builder who built the house. He might me interested in seeing what the sub-contractor who did the wiring did wrong. Cheers, Del
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