Not every project goes as well as planned. We would be happy to spend a few minutes answering your questions.
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A realtor called yesterday saying that she had no power in her garage and several other outlets. This is a pretty common call and so rather than head out to her home and start troubleshooting, I asked her to do a couple of things. Her husband is not afraid to get his hands dirty, and she said he had already replaced the GFCI outlet (ground fault circuit interrupter) and they still had no power.
I asked her to go to the main electrical panel and check to make sure that none of the breakers had tripped. She said she had already done that and the breakers were all on. I then asked her to walk around the house and check to see if any other GFCI outlets had tripped (GFCI outlets have a button that says "test" and another button that says "reset"). These outlets will trip off and stop the power flowing to the outlets downstream of it, if the outlet senses a ground fault. She hastily said she had, but I doubted it. Okay, so she did the easy stuff and still had a problem.
Upon arrival at the house, the first thing we checked was the main electrical panel. Sure enough, a circuit breaker had tripped off. We flipped it back on and her problem was solved. She was embarrassed.
Typically, when a breaker trips, it will end up sitting in between the "on" and "off" positions. It is pretty obvious when this happens. You first need to push the switch all the way to the "off" position and then flip it to "on".
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