Help! My outlet went out!

When working with electricity, it is always the safest to contact your trusted electrician for the best solution to the problem. If only some of your outlets are not working and there has not been an outage, it is likely that you have a failed connection that is not allowing power to keep flowing. Contact a Mister Sparky Dallas electrician for help.

Check Other Outlets

When an outlet stops working you should check around for other signals of the appliances that went out also. Test lights and flip switches on and off to make sure you found all the affected plugs. Once you find which outlets are out, unplug all appliances in that outlet.

Your next step is to check the circuit breaker, once all devices are removed from the dead outlet. Check for a tripped circuit breaker or blown fuse. If you don’t see a tripped breaker, firmly press every breaker to the “off” position.Then switch them back on. If the tripped breaker won’t reset without tripping again, there could be a potentially dangerous short circuit or ground fault condition. Switch the circuit breaker off until you have called your local Mister Sparky electrician to finish troubleshooting the issue.

GFCI Outlets

GFCI outlets are those unusual outlets with the test and reset buttons that are required in areas of the house where shock hazards are greatest.It is easy to overlook a tripped GFCI as the source of a dead outlet problem. That is because in areas where GFCI-protected outlets are required, electricians often save money by connecting additional standard outlets to one GFCI outlet. A current leak at any one of the outlets will trip the GFCI and cause all of the outlets connected to it to go dead.

If the GFCI “reset” button doesn’t pop out when you press the “test” button, there may be no power to the GFCI or you may have a bad GFCI. On the other hand, if the “reset” button trips again every time you press it, there may be a dangerous current leak somewhere on the circuit.

In either case, solving the problem requires additional electrical testing that we won’t cover here. Refer to your local trustworthy Mister Sparky® of Dallas Fort Worth to help you find a solution.