One of the electrical outlets in the kitchen didn’t work. If you plugged something in, the device wouldn’t work. We figured that I just needed to swap it out with another one.
An added complication was that this outlet was a ground fault interrupter. I was hoping that it wouldn’t be too much more difficult.
I turned off the circuit breaker for the kitchen and pulled out the offending outlet. The wiring looked pretty familiar with wires with white insulation, black insulation, and no insulation. Unfortunately, there was also a wire with red insulation. “Arf,” I thought. Also “That’s a new one.”
I checked this with google and got a surprise. Google also said “Arf” with respect to the red wire. It had an awful lot to say about white and black wires but nothing about red wires. At least as far as ground fault interrupt whatsits are concerned.
I reviewed my options for when I’m out of my depth with electrical stuff:
Option 1: Put it all back together the way I found it and pretend that this never happened.
This is a snivelling coward approach that I’m not always above. But I wasn’t sure which wires went in which holes. There was a good chance that I’d do one of the following:
- burn the house down
- kill myself
- both
Option 2: Call Conrad.
Still a bit snivelling but with fewer smoking ruins and dead bodies.
I called Conrad and he graciously offered to come over and take a look. He hooked up the wires to the outlet and asked me to turn on the circuit. I turned on the circuit and plugged something into the outlet. Nothing happened.
Conrad has a device that tests whether something has electricity running through it. I’ll call it a gizmo. Conrad pointed the gizmo at the wires and it said that they were getting power. He then pointed the gizmo at the outlet itself. Lots of power there too.
Conrad had me turn off the circuit and he rearranged the wires. This time, the outlet worked.
I asked Conrad what was different this time. He explained: “I did something stupid. I forgot that the wiring in this house uses the old style of chaining outlets instead of the new way of chaining outlets”
I said “I can see why that’d make you feel stupid.” I had no idea what he was talking about.
Later, I let Pam know via text message that the outlet was fixed/replaced. She asked if it was difficult. Reciting the above seemed a bit much for a text message, so I sent this instead:
tl;dr
Conrad installed the new one.
Close enough.
Stephen Squire 