A wall plug shorted in the living room of my one bedroom duplex and now I have no lights in the duplex. The plugs in the living room have no power, three of the four plugs in the bedroom have no power, and the plug in the dining area has no power.
I checked all of the circuit breakers with my multimeter and they all seem good because power comes from all of them and then when I turn the circuit breakers off I lose power. None of the circuit breakers seen flimsy they seem all solid from off to on.
All of the GFCI plugs in the kitchen still have power coming to them. The GFCI plug in the bathroom does not have power coming to it. The only light that works in the duplex is the one in the closet in the bedroom. What could be the problem?
Best Answer
What usually hapens is the overload causes the wires to fuse, as Greebo mentions.
But it doesn't fuse just anywhere. It fuses in a very specific place, namely, backstab / push connections. They are notorious for doing this. We recommend using side screws in wiring; backstabs are only intended as a speed shortcut for builders wiring in high production rates.
As you probably know, most circuits are wired in strings. (Legally they are allowed to be wired in "tree" fashion, unlimited branches never looping back on itself... but a vine is a type of tree, isn't it?)
Regardless, if you have some good outlets and some bad ones in the same circuit string, the problem is always at the first bad one, or the last good one. The term "outlet" also includes lighting and other hard-wired loads.