I spent a large part of my Thursday night, Friday and Saturday morning trying to fix the electrical problem.
It all started when JY called me at work on Thursday morning, she told me that the wall outlet that’s next to her looked burned-out, and that there were no electricity in two of our bedrooms. My house is fairly new, and I hadn’t dealt with anything so serious (to me at least) before. So I told my wife to stay calm, and told her I’ll take care of it when I get home. JY’s pregnant with our first child, she’s already under a lot of stress, I definitely don’t want to add to that stress.
When I got home, I found just as JY described. The wall outlet had a burned-out face plate. The prongs on extension cord attached to the outlet were burned as well.
I decided the first thing to do is to research. So I brought out couple of those thick home-improvement books, got a crash course on electrical systems. I decided to practice what I learned.
I first gathered some basic tools, removed the faceplate. The receptacle behind looked burned-out as well. I decided the first thing to do is to get a new one. So I turned off the circuit breaker that controls this area of the house, then remove the receptacle.
I brought the receptacle to the closest OSH, I was looking at all the receptacles they had there (there were quite a few), when a nice lady who works there asked me if I needed help, I was relieved that I was not alone facing my problem. She took a look at the burned-out one I brought, and told me to get the professional model, which is supposed to be much better. I asked her a bunch of questions, got the answers I needed, then went home with the shiny new professional receptacle.
Well, maybe because it was the professional model, the instruction on the box was really skimpy. One thing I noticed though, there were 8 holes in the back instead of the 4 holes on my original one. I was a bit concerned, don’t know which holes to plug the hot and neutral wires into. I tried all eight, none of which will screw tight enough to keep the wires in. I tried for half an hour without much success. The problem was it was the duplex model, it’s meant to be for pairs of hot wires. Anyway, I called OSH again, got the same lady who sold me the receptacle on the phone, trying to figure out why I couldn’t get it to work. Well, it took me on the phone for 10 minutes to figure out it’s not going to work. So I drove back to OSH, got the consumer model that looked exactly like the burned-out one. It took me 5 minutes in total to install it.
By now, I felt pretty handy. It’s the kind of invincibility one feels due to lack of understanding.
I then went to the main control panel, and flipped the switch to the ON position. However, the switch immediately jumped to the tripped position and I saw an arc. I didn’t know what to do, so I flipped the switch one more time, and the whole house went dark.
To be continued…