Question for electricians. Circuit tracing wall outlets?

If you don't have access to the mains panel what do you do if a trip/fuse blows?


It would normally be safe to assume that all sockets in a single room would be on the same circuit.  They way to test would be to turn off the breakers one at a time and see which sockets go dead...  but if you can't access the breaker panel...  what do you do if a breaker/fuse blows?

Plug lights into them- turn the lights on- start turning off breakers.

I added on to my house...one room extended...I checked all the outlets and they
were all on the same circuit....except the one I missed.
When I pulled the recepticles out of the box it grabbed a hold and I swear my
teeth did the long version drum solo to In-the gadda.

I thought I was going to have to take my wife to hospital when it was over...
she was in pain from laughing.
 
 
Be patient Mike. Herb will chime in shortly. You know those electicians....he won't
finish his morning coffee until around 9:30. :)
 

Running late.... its 9:49am....one more mouthful of cold coffee left.... uhhh.. ok all gone...

I'd suggest getting access to the breaker box. I have one of those tracer things and while it has been useful a time or two..... it mostly assists you in trying to make an educated guess as to what goes where. 

More than once I have plugged it in, went to the breaker panel and managed to shut off all sorts of things before I finally got the right one.  The plug in a circuit tester/tracer, go shut of the breakers one by one is the best method, then check all the others in the room. 

Double check with a known good and working meter before touching the metal screws and wires.


Whether the outlets are all on the same circuit or not depends greatly on who wired it and what they were thinking.   Normally, you would expect all the outlets in a bedroom to be on the same circuit. In a living room or a dining room you would expect to see maybe 2 circuits. In a kitchen code says thou shalt have 2 circuits minimum.... and a home owner can request anything they want. 

Oh the things I have seen. 

Pffft... in our last house, which was new at the time, 1993. I could NOT get rid of an electircal buzz in everything. Part of it was GA Power. I got them to come out and stood under the lines feeding the house with an AM radio. IT would buzz like heck if I got under the lines. They shecked at the pole and replaced something there and that part of the problem was fixed HOWEVER...

That was not the worst of it. I was still getting a LOT of noise in the house when trying to record, use a radio, or even play guitar. I started to pull wall plates from the outlets and switches... EVERY ground wire was loose and they had just used the places on the outlets and switches where you push in the A/C wires... I had to go through the whole house and tighten every ground wire. That pretty much fixed it... but I was amazed at what a sloppy job had been done.

I learned about electricity in the 1950s when I was a kid. My parents had a Philco console B&W TV in the bedroom across the room at the foot of the bed. Being yound and curious, I wondered what electricity woud do to me... so I just tok the direct route to knowledge and put my finger on one of the prongs (at that time there were no three way sockets). I guess I chose the right one to put my finger on because it only knocked me across the room, into the footboard of the bed. That was all I needed to know about electricity at that time.

I recently had a squrrell learnthe hard way about electricity at my wife's office, thankfully he was hanging half out of a hole under the roofline where he had been chewing on a wire. He wont be chewing anymore wires and the hole is fixed... the wiring replaced.

You gotta love noisy power... it gives you something to do!

bapu

spacey


I added on to my house...one room extended...I checked all the outlets and they
were all on the same circuit....except the one I missed.
When I pulled the recepticles out of the box it grabbed a hold and I swear my
teeth did the long version drum solo to In-the gadda.

 

New 2nd funniest post by spacey EVER!!!!!

LOL...a guy at work that I was telling about my last electical problem told me;
My neighbor came over the other night...needed to call the power company...So I dialed
them and handed him the phone....I knew what was said when he replied "next to Ed"...so
I took the phone and gave them the address!! LOL
 
 oh...that's true..the name I didn't even think of...it's just what he said. 

I've got a couple of these:



Plus the usual collection of these:



(The second ones are VERY recommended for gigs to make sure you don't use a bad socket.)

Turn a circuit breaker off, put the tool (cheaply purchased at any hardware store like Home Depot or Lowes) into the receptacle.  If the tool lights up and buzzes, then that receptacle is still hot.