In December, we moved to a new home. This home was built in 1994, so while it may not be state-of-the-art, it is much newer than any other home I've ever lived in. It's also probably a great deal newer than any apartment I lived in before that. So every once in a while something goes wrong and I find that it's a "learning experience" to figure out how to fix it because the new house is so different from anything I've known before.
Last night I was trimming the boxwood hedges around the back of the house. It was something I'd never done before, so I was nervous about it, but I seemed to be doing a pretty darned good job (if I say so myself). As I was trimming the hedges around the ornamental fish pond out back, I lost my balance a bit and the trimmers caught the power cord for the pond's water pump. Naturally, this shorted out the wiring and (I thought) tripped a circuit breaker.
I unplugged the damaged cord so that I could stop the short circuit and went inside to the breaker box in the basement. After looking very carefully at all the breakers, none appeared to be tripped. Nevertheless, I reset every one of them that I thought could possibly be the problem. No good. Still no power to any outlet outside.
That caused me to think about ground fault interruptors (GFIs). These devices look like a standard electrical outlet, but with an extra button or two on them. The purpose of the device is to prevent electric shock in the event (for instance) I had fallen into the ornamental pond carrying the electric hedge trimmers. I figured the short-circuit caused by cutting the pond pump wire probably tripped one of these rather than a circuit breaker in the breaker box. After walking all around the house, I saw that none of the outside outlets had a GFI on it. I figured I must have just missed the breaker in the basement.
I went back in and reset every single circuit breaker. No good. Still no power outside. Totally lost at this point to explain the lack of power outside, I spoke with a family friend (who built his own house, so he knows quite a bit about how houses work). He told me that it is possible the GFI for the outside outlets isn't outside at all. It could be an outlet in the kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, etc. I didn't know it could work that way. I went around to all the GFIs in the house and, sure enough, a GFI in the downstairs bathroom had been tripped. After resetting that GFI, power was restored to the outside outlets.
This caused me to mentally establish the following "electrical troubleshooting" procedure when a device quits working:
- Check to see that the device isn't unplugged.
- Make sure there is electrical power elsewhere in the house.
- Try a different socket in the electrical outlet, since a worn outlet can lose contact.
- See if the electrical device works in another outlet that you know has power.
- Check to see that the electric outlet isn't connected to a switch that has been flipped off.
- Look for a GFI that has been tripped by your activity prior to the power outage, remembering that the GFI might be in a different room or on a different floor of the house.
- Look for a circuit breaker that might have been tripped by your activity.
If all the above fails, it's either time to call an electrician or a more knowledgeable friend.
