Wow what a day! Finally got the electrical problem solved that had my main kitchen lights out, one wall of my garage, part of the wall outlet in my master bedroom, my patio lights and a portion of my computer/multi-media room and one wall of my living room.
What happened was that one day I decided that I am going to finish my floors and used this crosscut saw that pulls a bit of juice. Well as soon as I powered it up to make the cut it went dead. This has happened before so I just went and reset the surge protector that tripped. Sure enough that let me fire up the saw again but this time it stopped again and it popped more than the surge protector. I traced the issue back to the wall socket in the garage.
No problem right? Went to the circuit breakers and tripped a few of them I thought would take care of the problem but still this didn't work. Now I had to trip all of the breakers but not before gracefully taking down the web and music server as well as my main system. Still this did not turn on the outlet.
This was like over 3 weeks ago...actually I believe this was the day after Thanksgiving! I have had so many things to do that were time critical I didn't have time to get to this! Besides with the wet and foggy weather didn't make it conducive for outside electrical work. Besides I like to fix everything myself as much as possible and I'm pretty good with electrical flow.
Anyway the final solution ended up being a loose wire in electrical panel. Found this after replacing every circuit breaker with a circuit breaker from the store and testing the power to the breakers before and after! I checked every outlet now working and they all looked great.
I had to finally call in help. Everyone kept talking about the GFI well I only had one in the house and that was in the master bathroom plus one in the electrical panel. I had tried both of the GFI's and they worked as they were supposed to. I even tried the one on my pool pump...I was reaching.
Well the electrical person I had come out was also perplexed. Went over the same things I did, pulled out my multi-meter checked the voltages on the circuit panel, checked the GFI's, checked the outlets and everything looked the way it should. Finally decided to check for loose wires in the circuit panel and noticed a lone wire to the opposite side of the inputs to the individual breakers and it was a bit loose and the screw wasn't able to properly apply pressure on the wire. So he moved the wire to another place on the panel and presto. This wire went to the GFI in the electrical circuit panel but was making just enough contact to give the appearance that all was well with the GFI even though it wasn't!!
Then after we go that going I wasn't able to get my second LAN going that I have my website on as well as a few other systems including one of my backup music servers that I use. I had to go ahead and reset my router re-run some of my Ethernet cables (wireless isn't fast enough for most of what I do). I then had to then reprogram my router with my customer network and gateway etc... I started to place my old router into service!! One thing this showed me though I will keep the old router for a backup!!
I'm going to bed to read, finally tomorrow I can move forward on my home projects without being bothered by this crazy electrical issue!!
December 2004 Archives
I am going to shutdown the website server as well as my music servers today as I do some more electrical work on the home front.
All my servers are personally built by myself and maintained by no one else but myself.
I have a 1 GHz Linux web server running Fedora core 1 serving up the web pages and the music server is an Intel dual Xeon 2.4 running all SCSI. I have several backup servers ready to perform or take over the functions. Plus my personal desk top Intel 3.2E GHz 1mb cache system
Well time to get ready to do work I can go over specific technical specs of my operation another time.
Hey all click on over to my Radio Blog, currently I have 2 music servers with one playing my normal sounds and the other playing Christmas tunes:
http://www.dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/
Still in the process of finding my "Feng Shui" and getting closer but now down to things with some real value and I don't need so will try and find a decent place for all of the low end computers and peripherals I don't need. Indoors I have made a great deal of progress, moving everything to the garage for staging, sorting and movement out of the house for good.
