We're renovating a hundred-year-old house that's been through several owners and has hodge-podge wiring. I've redone all the wiring from scratch in the rooms we've re-walled. Everything has gone well until I messed with some old wiring in the kitchen..
Quick version: I replaced an outlet on the outside of the house that was part of the kitchen circuit because it killed part of the circuit and I have no idea why. Now I've killed the whole circuit by pressing reset on one of the GFCI's and now I'm really lost.
Long version: I have already replaced all the counter outlets with GFCI, and everything's been working fine for months (plug-in tester lit up correctly on all of them), so I know they're wired correctly. Yesterday I went to replace an exterior outlet (outside the kitchen wall) with a GFCI, but when I turned the circuit back on, half of it didn't work. It's an old house so each circuit has A LOT on it. This one has 13 outlets and 4 ceiling lights. From what I've been able to work out from looking under the house is that the circuit appears to start in the middle of the kitchen, go along one wall then up to the ceiling for the lights, then (I believe) it comes back down into the wall on the other side, splits in two somewhere, forms two legs, and dead-ends in two places. What's strange is that the outlets I killed are all upstream of the one I was working on, or they're on the other "leg" of the circuit.
I worked my way backwards to the first outlet that was working, replacing all with brand new outlets, wiring exactly as I found them. No change. Tonight, trying to think of everything I could have possibly not tried yet, I pressed the reset button of one of the dead kitchen GCFI outlets and the rest of the circuit blew. Tried to reset the breaker and it made a sparking sound and stayed off. Now the whole kitchen circuit is dead, and I don't know where the problem is.
What is happening?? I was meticulous with matching the old wiring once things went awry but I was on autopilot replacing the first exterior outlet. It's possible that I didn't notice some funky wiring and messed it up by installing it "correctly." I have come across some non-switched wires that had the white and black reversed in other parts of the house. Could a hot and neutral be reversed here, would that cause this kind of problem?
I'm pretty sure I need to replace the breaker now, but if I don't fix what's wrong I'll just blow the new one too..
Best Answer
Yeah, the problem is your work methods. When you hit a problem, you're not stopping to iterate on the problem until it's fixed, as you should. You are ignoring it and dashing off to do yet other work. So now you have a set of compound problems that are all interacting with each other.
You seem to think that one thing breaking breaks another thing, for instance you are now keen to replace the breaker. The breaker is just doing its job, you have a short in the wiring. If you don't know what to do, don't do random other things; focus on learning what you need.
Given the depths of this mess, it may be beyond our help.
Fortunately, it doesn't matter: it's all coming out.
When you have the walls exposed, you must modernize to Code
It's not enough to swap the old wires for new wires. You need to rearrange circuits and outlets to conform to modern Code.
In the kitchen, that is a big job. It involves quite a number of new circuits. Some of them must be dedicated to the kitchen, so for instance it will no longer be possible to have a circuit that serves kitchen receptacles and also other locations.
How that's done is beyond the scope of this question, but you have a lot to do. It will entirely moot the problems you're having now. The upside is you get to do it all as new work, so you can start from scratch. This also means you'll only need at most one GFCI per circuit, so that'll save you some money.
Oh, but I can only do half the job
Then you have to do the half that you can do; that is to say, use the access you have today to prepare for when you are able to do the rest of the work.
What you cannot do is use the excuse "well, we don't have ALL the access we need" to simply do nothing at all, and leave the old work wholly non-compliant.
Also, the claim that "we can't get wires through that other part we're not remodeling" isn't really true at all. A competent old-work experienced electrician can get wires through all sorts of places you might not think. Or you could simply expand the scope of the drywall work you'll be having done anyway, to gain a few key access points.