Troubleshooting an Outlet That Has Stopped Working > 자유게시판

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An outlet that has gone dead is one of the more common household electrical complaints, and a surprising proportion of them resolve without any repair at all.

Start with the breaker panel. A tripped breaker is not always obvious, because some sit in a middle position rather than fully off. Push the handle all the way to off, then back to on. If it will not stay, stop there.

Next, look for ground fault protection. This is the single most common reason for an apparently dead outlet, and the reason people miss it is that the protecting device is often in another room. Bathroom outlets, garage outlets, outdoor outlets and kitchen counter outlets are frequently wired downstream of one device. Find every such device in the house, including in the garage and outside, and press reset on each.

Third, check whether the outlet is switched. Many rooms have one half of one outlet controlled by a wall switch for a lamp. If the switch is off, the outlet is dead and nothing is wrong.

Fourth, test with something you know works. A phone charger that has been unreliable is not a test instrument. Use a lamp you have just confirmed works elsewhere.

If none of that resolves it, the fault is in the wiring or the device, and the likely locations are limited.

Back-wired outlets, where the conductor is pushed into a hole in the back of the device rather than looped under a screw terminal, fail more often than screw-terminated ones. The internal contact is a spring, and springs relax.

Loose neutral connections at a junction box upstream will kill everything downstream. This is why a dead outlet sometimes comes with two or three other dead outlets that nobody noticed because nothing was plugged into them.

Worth noting, an outlet that has gone dead after making any noise, producing any smell, or showing any discolouration around the slots should not be reset and retried. Those signs indicate heat, and heat inside a box is worth looking at rather than resetting.

Further reading: full article