Positively Electric

This past weekend, the electrical outlets in our kitchen went out.  They had done so a little over a year ago, so I knew where to look for the problem.  Once Doug and I confirmed that it was the same outlet and that I could not easily fix it, we decided to call the electrician.  The company that fixed it in April of 2024 said that it was past its one year warranty and would have to charge us $167 just to come out and look at it.  I tried another company with good reviews. They could send someone right away and it would only cost $35 for the trip.  I thought that I might as well try them since the first one did not solve the problem.  

Several days ago, the electrician came out and said that it was the same GFCI outlet that was the issue.  It would not reset and he felt it was because it was installed incorrectly.  I believed everything that he said as it seemed reasonable.  After diagnosing the faulty outlet, he also stated that the issue could have been caused by an electrical surge.  He pushed pretty hard for us to put in a surge protector because of all of the lightning strikes in Florida.  He might have talked me into it until he said that it was over $1000.  That was a lot more than I wanted to spend.  I thanked him and asked that he just fix the outlet for the $234 he quoted me. 

I was very hopeful that replacing the outlet would be the end of our electrical woes, but unfortunately the next morning, the entire set out of outlets were out again.  I started to believe that maybe I had made a mistake in not getting the surge protector.  Instead of calling the electrician back, I called the electric company.  I explained the issue, and they agreed to send out one of their electricians to make sure that we were not getting power surges form the outside line.  They arrived quickly and were able to tell me that everything coming into the house was working correctly. They were also able to validate my opinion that we didn't need a surge protector as a power surge of that magnitude would cause more than just one set of outlets to go out and that we would notice a lot of other issues such as blinking lights.

I decided after talking to the electric company that I would solve the problem on my own.  I didn't want to call an electrician as I knew that they would push me to buy something that I didn't need.  Instead, I shut out the power to our home and started changing the outlets in the daisy chain one by one.  Sure enough, once I replaced the second outlet that I was suspicious of, the power came back on, and all outlets worked.  I even overloaded them by plugging in multiple small appliances and the GFCI stayed on.  I was surprised at first that I figured it out so quickly, but it made sense when I thought about how electrical currents worked - one bad outlet would definitely cause an issue if they were all connected to it. 

I spent the rest of the day excited about my ability to fix the outlets.  It not only saved us several hundred dollars, but I also was able to put in outlets that looked a lot nicer with our new granite.  I was pretty proud of the new look.