Handyman Fixes Mystery Electrical Problems | THE HANDYMAN |

[Music] all right something's wrong here he's making whistling sounds and not piano sounds welcome back you're watching the number one home improvement youtube channel in the entire world today i've got a little electrical project for you they want to play their electric piano right here next to these music notes and they haven't plugged into this outlet here and no power we got no power no button working this could be a simple repair could be something simple as pushing a button i'm not sure now i've done a lot of these videos in the past where i go reset gfi outlets and people lose their mind that i charge customers for resetting gfi outlets i got a little analogy for you so say you uh you want your carpets cleaned you call up a carpet cleaner and say hey can you come clean my carpets and they answer the phone they're like hey you know what you can save some money by doing it yourself you know you can rent a carpet cleaner and clean your carpets yourself okay here's another one you're driving down the road in your automobile and a little thing comes up and says uh change your oil pull on into jiffy lube and say i need an oil change they say well you know what you can save some money by just going to buy your own oil and filter the drain plug is right there do you get where i'm going people call me to do something not to tell them how to go do it it's not good for business i know some history on the house this is a staircase this would have been the only framed wall in the entire basement when this house was built and every basement comes with one outlet that is connected to a gfi circuit it's usually connected to either the exterior outlets the garage outlets or even sometimes a bathroom gfi circuit keep in mind this is mid-90s that's how they did it back then i should know because just two blocks away is where i started my career as an electrician that's all i did was wire houses just like this now i say hey you know it's probably a gfi outlet go look for some buttons they're gonna be like let me go look for some buttons now you come and look for some buttons now that we got that out of the way let's see if we can make this outlet work i'm gonna take you through the troubleshooting process i'm gonna show you some interesting things that have gone on in this track home it was built in the mid 90s it's had several owners one of the owners finished his basement they also put a sub panel in the garage they removed some breakers out of the panel to make room for the 70 amp breaker that goes to the garage so if you're interested in diagnosing this problem with me stick around this is the plug tester i'm going to use there'll be links in the description for this plug tester i finally have an amazon store for you it's one link in the description it takes you to amazon where i've organized all my tools and so you can kind of browse through there and you know pick out what you need it's got couple lights on it and a couple different codes of different possible lighting problems so i'm going to put this in here and see what we get see what we get we got nothing and that means we have an open hot or no power as i said earlier this wall here didn't have any drywall on it when the house was built so it is probably the location of that one basement outlet that is on a gfi uh it's just a guess there's this has been finished there's lots of outlets all over the place now another possible first step would be just to go around to all the gfi locations go to the kitchen the bathroom laundry room garage looking for gfi outlets where the button is tripped but since i'm already down here in the basement i'm just going to open this up because option number two for a dead outlet is that one of the wires has come off the back looks like this has been sprayed over with drywall texture i may just throw a new outlet in here just because i i've got some with me in the in the trailer again link in the description uh definitely no power back there so this here so it's grounded to the metal box and this is this is actually in flex everything looks real tight in here i am going to end up replacing this outlet just because it's already out and it's been covered in wall texture and paint i got to go find the gfi the button to push so we're going to go i'm going to take you with me what is this you guys remember this bathroom we're gonna start in the bathroom because we we know that we've got gfi outlets here we've got um test and reset and test and reset so those were already set and not tripped we're gonna go find some more i know i said i was going to the garage or bathrooms but since i'm in the basement i'm just making my rounds so there is test and reset so it wasn't that one we are in the garage and this is the original garage outlet you get one outlet in your garage this outlet should also be gfi protected we'll see if it's on the same circuit okay so the garage outlet is dead we're in a bathroom and look at that so the bathroom the basement and the garage are on the same gfi circuit we are in an upstairs hall bathroom and i have found a gfi outlet and you can see it's got a little child protector on the bottom and it looks like the reset button is popped out just gonna pull this out here oh look at that yeah no lights watch this we got lights two lights on go to our little code reader and it says correct for two yellow lights two yellow lights okay back to the bathroom we got lights got lights correct hey we are in the garage and we have lights lights on the bottom lights on the top so i'll mention this these broken things to them and if i've got enough outlets with me i will replace that one too we're back down in the basement and look at that two lights we are correct so i am going to replace this just because it's all yucked up [Music] so [Music] oh it's going too fast oh as you can see we fixed the problem and they can play their piano i wish i knew how to play the piano do you guys know how to play the piano i'm gonna quick address some of the crazy questions i get on every gfi resetting video that i have uh one is going to be oh my god how is that possible the basement outlet is controlled by the upstairs bathroom i'm not talking the maple i'm talking two floors up yes that's how it was done in 1995 1997. it's just a fact of life get over it uh i didn't go check the exterior outlets but my guess is all the exterior weather proof outlets are also on the same gfi circuit oh there we go why do you call it a gfi not a gfci ground fault circuit interrupter well when i was electrician they just called it a gfi all electricians refer to it as a gfi now i think i addressed it why didn't i just tell this this homeowner to go start pushing buttons if you got any questions please put them in the comments section below uh hopefully this saves you some money if you are a diy-er maybe you're not a diy-er but you're just out here googling why your dang basement outlet doesn't work and you want to know what's the electrician going to do when he comes to your house probably the exact same thing for the sake of this video i took a few extra steps he may have just went straight to that bathroom and push the button and collected 500 well that's it on to the next one

Channel: The Handyman

Views: 188,828

Keywords: electrician, plugs not working, gfci, gfi, home improvement, reno, renovation, finished basement, diy projects, handyman business, the handyman, no power to outlet, electrician tools, tools of the trade, skilled trades, skilled trades jobs, how much does an electrician charge, electrician by the hour

Id: bJ-0VUPbLmE

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020