Power is out to part of my house, what do I do?
This is a call we often get, “I don’t know what happened but I don’t have power to part of my house.” We will respond and ask the customer if they have checked their GFCI receptacles to see if they need to be reset by pushing the button marked reset, and also if they have any circuit breakers in their panel that appear to be tripped in an attempt to save them the cost of a service call. As our earlier post stated, GFCI protection is required in kitchens, bathrooms, garages, and outdoors. In your home, these are common places to find GFCI receptacles that could trip. Many homes will have several receptacles controlled by one GFCI receptacle, usually located in one of these locations. If you checked all of these locations and still can’t find the problem, or if you found the GFCI and it wasn’t tripped, the next step would be to examine your electrical panel. Typically in the panel your circuit breaker handles will be all pointed toward the center of the panel. In some cases they point towards the outside of the panel as in a Federal Pacific Panel. Nonetheless, if you have one breaker that has the handle in the center portion of the breaker it is likely tripped. Some breakers have trip indicators which will show an orange or red tab through a small window in the breaker. If a breaker is tripped, there is likely a cause for it, weather it is overloaded or short circuited. If it is overloaded, simply remove some of the load by unplugging some of the items plugged into the circuit and moving them to a different part of your home, then reset the breaker. If this is the case you may want to call an electrician to add a circuit to the affected area so this doesn’t happen again. If there is no evidence of overloading, then a device that is plugged into the circuit or the circuit itself may have short circuited, tripping the breaker. It is best at this point to recruit the help of a qualified licensed electrical contractor to take a good look at things and advise you as to potential solutions to your problem. If this sounds like something that is going on in your home, give us, HB Electric Solutions, a call at 253-256-7861, or email us at info@hbelectricsolutions.com.