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Trouble Kitchen plug sparks
Saturday Night Power Outage Takes Out The Lights
We were watching the ten o'clock news when my cell phone rang. A woman wascalling from her apartment on Montgomery Street near Vallejo. In a worried sounding voice she said "My refrigerator power and most of my lights have gone out and my neighbor says he doesn't think it's safe. Can you come over?"I asked "Was anyone doing anything when this happened?" She said the only thing she was doing was washing down the counter top and then sparks came out of the wall plug and the lights went out.
I drove over there and she opened the door. I went into a darkened apartment. She had a flashlight and so did I. She showed me the Square-D circuit breaker panel in the closet. The panel was partially blocked by cabinetry. One circuit breaker was tripped. When I tried to re-set the breaker, it jumped back, and a loud scary sound came from around the corner in the kitchen. I knew there was a short somewhere.
The question is "where". Since the neighbor took the cover plate off of the kitchen plug receptacle I checked that first. I disconnected the plug device in case it was shorted internally, but it didn't help. I unplugged all the plugs that were currently not working in case an extension cord was shorted. The circuit breaker still jumped back and would not reset.
I noticed the hot wire had been looped around the power screw on the plug device. I decided to cut off the "U" shaped loop of copper wire, thereby splitting off anything downstream from the plug device. At this point I was able to reset the breaker and most of the lights came on. I went around plugging things back in everything started working again.
Now the task was to find anything else that is still not working. Something should be off since I disconnect one black wire. We spent a few minutes checking lights and appliances and we were unable to find anything that was not working. I wrote an invoice, got paid and thanked her. I asked her to call me as soon as she found anything not working as that would solve the mystery so I could schedule it for repair next week in normal business hours.
I enjoy this kind of trouble call because it's like a whodunit mystery. In this case it is still a mystery. That wire goes out of the plug outlet and down half inch pipe. Something down that pipe is very shorted but everything seems to work.
©2009 John A. Peters
