Bathroom and Adjacent Breakfast room outlets non functioning

jterp7

As the title states, the main floor bathroom and the adjacent breakfast room outlets are not working. The overhead chandelier in the breakfast room, however, works fine, as do the kitchen outlets.

I have checked all of the GFCI outlets and tested/reset them including the two in the kitchen and the ones upstairs. The only one that doesn't reset or respond to test is the one in the breakfast room.

Strange thing is that the morning before the problems the outlets and everything worked fine before I left for work. I know this because the TV and the bathroom lights worked. The only thing that I know my wife does is unplug the surge protector from the outlet (TV connected to this one), which she does quite frequently so the kids don't have the TV on all the time. My suspicion is all the jiggling from inserting and removing the thick plug from the outlet loosened one of the wires.

I opened said outlet yesterday but did not really know what to look for. I received a slight shock when trying to see what was wrong with it so I ended up putting it back. I'm fairly certain there are safer ways of checking the problem and I'm not doing those

DownRiverGuy

Am I to assume that all of this is on one circuit??? :-/

A bathroom has to have it's own 20A GFCI circuit (however there are some expections that allow bathroom to share said circuit)

A kitchen has to have two 20A GFCI circuts for the counter area. It sounds like this circuit (breakfast room) is not one of those.

To go back to your situation however.... have you checked the breaker panel to see if the breaker itself is tripped? Granted you did say it shocked you so that may not be the issue...

I would get a tester and see if you get a reading from either side of the GFCI device. One of the outlets may have just gone bad...

jterp7

no, none of them were tripped, but I reset the breakfast room anyway. That didn't seem to reset the GFCI that was in the breakfast room. Nor did it bring back power to the outlets originally affected

Scuba_Dave

You need a meter to test for power
Then you can figure out if its a loose wire or dead GFCI outlet

jterp7

I got a meter to test the outlets..all of them showed 0 on the killawatt. Does that mean I was imagining it when I got shocked poking around in that one outlet I opened up?

Something interesting to note is that the GFCI that is dead is also one that is not listed on the breaker panel. I believe there are 4 total: garage, 2 kitchen, and 1 master bath. The one in the breakfast room also has a led indicator (currently out). How do I reset a GFCI that isn't even listed on the breaker panel?

Jim F

Are these two areas on the same loop as the faulty GFCI in the breakfast room. If so, that would account for the other receptacles being dead. It would also account for why you got shocked- GFCI tripped, circuit breaker active. Probably the next step is to replace the failed GFCI and see if it helps. As stated it may not be up to code for these two areas to share a circuit.

Scuba_Dave

Showed zero what ?
You need a meter with probes to test for power
If a GFCI will not reset then replace it
GFCI outlets are not required to be listed on the breaker panel
When a GFCI outlet fails/trips it only shuts off power DOWNSTREAM of the GFCI outlet
Power TO the GFCI is not shut-off by a GFCI outlet tripping

jterp7

The only info I can provide is that the Townhouse was built in 2000, and that the breakfast room outlets and the adjacent front area bathroom lights don't work. In hindsight, it was silly to play with the outlet while the breaker was active so I will make sure it is off in the future. Technically there is an outlet in the bathroom that I think functions (tested with killawatt) but the overhead lights and overhead ventilating fan switches do not. I have not opened up the GFCI above..but I believe it was added post-construction because the previous owners added it to mount their TV on the wall. We have never used that outlet since we moved in on Aug 09 so it seems strange for that outlet to fail right now.

by test we plugged in a killawatt tester. It shows 121 for the active ones and does not power on when the outlet is dead. By meter are you referring to those probes that I used in physics class in college? voltmeter?