Last Sunday evening before the sun went down, due to Little Harry, I made a little discovery of sorts. He was unplugging his cell phone charger from one of the living room outlets and the power for the entire house blew! The whole house!
I trudged down to the basement to flip the breakers back on and found that the living room and the main breakers had been shut off. So I turned the living room on then the main power. They immediately popped off again. So I did this in reverse order: I turned on the main power and you could hear things turning back on. Next I turned on the living room. This proceeded to pop all the power again. Hmm, that wasn’t good.
Little Harry proceeded to inform me that when I did it the second time sparks flew from the electrical outlet. Yikes, also not so good. Well, we shut off all the power again, got out some handy tools and proceeded to remove the outlet completely. This is what we found:
The outlet was all nice and crispy! That is definitely not a good thing. Obviously the outlet was bad and we just so happened to have a few new ones in our large stores of junk that we don’t throw away. I replaced it lickety-split and everything works wonderfully now.
It is scary to think what may have happened if we weren’t there to notice it…or worse if everyone was sleeping!
