threeplusfire: (Nikolai stare)
three ([personal profile] threeplusfire) wrote2010-01-24 02:02 pm

electric

Our house is having electrical woes. For some reason, the outlets in both bathrooms and on the back porch have stopped working some months ago. Out of curiosity today we decided to flip all the breakers to see if they would come back to life. Nothing in the breaker box is labeled. We've discovered that the entire back bedroom, bathroom and porch do not respond to any breaker. So far we haven't discovered any secret second breaker box anywhere.

This sort of exhausts the limits of my electrical home expertise, so we'll have to call an electrician. I have a sort of dread that it will require expensive repair.

[identity profile] freznor.livejournal.com 2010-01-24 09:30 pm (UTC)(link)
Wow, that's eerily similar to our recent experience... I spent an hour Saturday attempting to cut the power to our front porch light so I could install a new timer switch into the circuit. I found the Secret Secondary Breaker Box (SSBB(tm)) outside, but eventually determined that killing this single light bulb requires shutting down the entire house -- i.e. only the master breaker cuts power to that switch.

This isn't the only weirdity, so I'm planning to have a professional out to see if re-organizing some of this crazy wiring is practical. We should compare notes once either one of us gets someone to diagnose the issues.

I'm so glad half of my degree was EE classes -- in which I learned the differential equations to model a transmission line, but practical electrical circuitry work clearly eludes me...

[identity profile] tsarina.livejournal.com 2010-01-24 09:46 pm (UTC)(link)
Our houses are roughly the same vintage, so maybe there was an epidemic of crazy electrical contractors at the time. How odd.