Not Fried

I passed the Smoke Test. It has been three hours since I installed the last of six replacement electrical outlets, and nothing has caught fire yet. I am also not electrocuted. More importantly, I have electricity in my office again, two days after we first noticed that none of the outlets worked.

Replacing the outlets marks my first foray into the wide world of home wiring. Until now, all the home repairs I have had to do involved the plumbing. An argument could be made that the house's record is still intact, since the circuit that went kerblooey, prompting me to replace the receptacles on it, includes the socket that the water softener is plugged into.

A phone consultation with PengDad, who has some experience with home repairs, convinced me that the most likely causes of my problem were all things I could handle myself, even though until recently my toolbox was a corrugated cardboard box. I decided to skip the first solution and went straight for replacing the outlets. There were a couple around the house that were broken and needed replaced (none, of course, in that room), and if I was going to have to do two, what's the difference doing six? Two hours, for those keeping track.

As it turns out, no matter how justifiable replacing the outlets was, that was probably not the cause of the problem. Seems the GFCI outlet behind the utility room sink--and, critically, at the head of the circuit that powers my office outlets--had tripped. Nothing like spending an afternoon fixing a problem that could have been solved by pushing one button.

Note to PengDad: the sockets ended up being 33 cents apiece, after I convinced the sales clerk that there was absolutely no way that a box of 10 outlets cost $17. Perhaps, sometime, you can explain to me why the outlets cost 33 cents and the cover plates cost 48 cents apiece.