We accidentally ran our microwave and an electric tea kettle on the same outlet at the same time. Suddenly neither would turn on. I brought out my volt meter and it reads a curious 13 volts vs the nearest outlet that reports 122 volts.
I checked the breakers and reset each one and even took off the outlet cover and hooked the volt meter up to the wires and it still reports 13 volts.
The outlet appears to have 3 wires, I'm guessing the neutral, the ground and the hot wire.
I haven't removed the outlet and tested the wires without the outlet in the circuit… But does this sound like a busted outlet?
I can't seem to find any other outlets reporting low voltage so I'm guessing there's nothing wrong with the breaker or the wires.
Best Answer
I suspect you may have something called a multi-wire branch circuit, which uses one set of three wires (rather than two pairs of wires) to handle as much load as two separate circuits. Current electrical codes require that multi-wire branch circuits must be powered by a pair of breakers that are interlocked so that whenever either one is turned off or tripped the other will likewise be disconnected, but some installations lack that interlock. Yours may be one of them.
If a circuit is run as two wires from the panel to the load, then when the breaker trips everything in the circuit will be de-energized. Likewise if a multi-wire branch circuit is run as three wires and both breakers are tripped or switched off, everything will be de-energized. Unfortunately, if only one breaker trips, devices on the side of the circuit controlled by disconnected breaker may receive a generally-small amount of current through devices connected to the live breaker. While such currents would generally not be large enough to cause a fire unless they were sufficient to trip the breaker on the other side, they could still be lethal to someone touching the "disconnected" circuit. Worse, a variety of factors may cause the amount of available voltage and current on the "disconnected" circuit to change unexpectedly, so even if a voltage tester shows that a circuit is "dead" that doesn't mean it won't seemingly-spontaneously become lethally energized as soon as the tester is put away.
Multi-wire branch circuits are cheaper to install than individually-wired circuits, and are perfectly safe when the breakers controlling them are properly interlocked, but can be dangerous when such interlocks are not installed.