To set the scene, I was working on straightening up the garage when I came across an old golf bag that needed to thrown out. Now there were several ways I could've gone about it. I could have A) just put it in my empty second trash, B) taken it to the dump on Saturday or C) cut it half with a pneumatic cutting disc. So of course the path most rad is the path most taken by me.
Everything went smooth and I cut through that SOB up like butter that had been sitting in the sun. I cleaned up and was headed inside, but as I hit the garage door, nothing happened. There is a little red light on the inside of the button that wasn't lit. This was not good.
After several minutes of freaking out and just hitting the button over and over again like that may magically help, I decided to try and find out what the actual problem may be.
Now this house was built a while ago, and the electrical is a bit dated. The breaker box is, say, antique-ish. But none of the breakers had been tripped.
AHA! It must be the outside breaker box, the one that runs the dryer and other high voltage items in the house. Nothing tripped there either.
After a while of sulking and trying to figure out how I'm going to pay for an actual electrician to come figure out what is going on, I talked to my grandfather and he gave me the idea to check out the GFI outlets.
For those that don't know a GFI outlet is made to trip when the electricity is going through an unintended path or in excess. Basically, when your spouse throws the toaster in the bathtub with you, it trips so that they're not able to cash in on your life insurance.
In addition these outlets are made so that they can take a load going out of it. Essentially saying a normal outlet can be run out of the GFI and trip it, shutting off current to the normal outlet. Which is why in a lot of bathrooms you see one GFI and one regular outlet.
So my thinking was that the garage must run off a GFI somewhere else in the house (foreshadowing- it was).
There were two places I thought it could be linked through, either off the back deck, on the same terminal that the sprinklers were attached, or in the basement. As I went outside to check the back deck outlet, it should've dawned on me that the sprinklers were running at the time, so it obviously couldn't have been that one. So off to the basement, aka THUNDERDOME
Now this part is strange to me because this is the only time I've ever encountered this type of problem. The GFI had been tripped but wasn't resetting, meaning then you push the reset butting, the tiny light that was supposed to come on didn't and the test button that was supposed to pop out but didn't.
In my head, this could've either meant that there was no electricity going to the outlet, or the outlet itself was bad. Hopefully, the latter of the two since the first would've been a massive problem to deal with.
One particularly funny tidbit to the story. I talked about how the breaker box was quite old, and the outside one was pretty new. But neither were marked with what breaker went where. Now one of my least favorite things to happen to me is to get electrocuted. 1/2 out of 5 stars is what I would rate it. So there is no way I'm going to let it happen. As I'm trying to figure out what is wrong, and where, I have to run to the first breaker box, shut off the main, then run all the way through the house to shut off the one in the backyard, then run ALL the way back to the basement and try and work quickly before anything that was supposed to be running gets messed up. About 4 times that happened.
Now a GFI isn't a terribly hard thing to replace (it's the realizing that's what you need to do is the chore), there are just several things you have to keep in mind. Think of it like your cable box. There is electricity going in and electricity going out. If you put in the cord to your TV in the "IN" and the cord from outlet going to the "OUT" it's not going to work, the only difference is that your TV probably won't have the potential to start an electrical fire.
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Most of the time the wire are large gauges. So a pair of needle nose pliers work the best to wrap the wire around the terminals on the outlet.
On the back of a GFI there is a spot for "LINE" and "LOAD". In addition, on the bottom there will be a spot for the grounding wire. The LINE is where the hot wires go into and LOAD is what goes to the next outlet. A very important trick is to mark the wires as you take them off of the old outlet. That way you know what goes where, and then from there, black goes to negative(hot) and white is positive(neutral). Don't forget to connect the ground, usually a green or completely stripped wire, to the terminal on the bottom.
POOF! The garage door was back online, and everything was well with the world. I mean, it probably wouldn't have been too much of an inconvenience to just open it by hand. But dammit I live in the 21st century and until SKYNET takes over, I'm taking advantage of every piece of machinery available to me.
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