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I plugged in a Space Heater to my outlet, now my outlet doesn't work. Power still on

Home Improvement Asked by whitelam on February 22, 2021

I’m a college kid living in my first house (not dorm) who knows absolutely nothing about electrical systems. I found the breaker box(?) in the back yard but have no idea what I would have to flip to even troubleshoot. Any help would be appreciated. The problem is summarized in the title.

In addition to my specific outlet not working, an outlet in an adjacent room also doesn’t work. I still have power and just moved my PC to another outlet.

One Answer

Check for a tripped breaker, not always obvious, but usually are. If the panel is properly labeled, try turning off the breaker for the problematic circuit and then back on again, if that fixes the problem, you're good to go and don't use that space heater on the same circuit again!

EDIT: An excellent comment below which needs to be repeated here: If you are renting the house, this is a landlord problem and you should limit your activities to resetting breakers.

If no breakers tripped and resetting them just in case didn't fix the problem, you probably have a blown back stab outlet. They are notorious for failing under heavy loads.

Since you said you have no electrical experience, A quick lesson: Back stabs are a colloquial term used in electrical trades for outlets that to install, all you had to do was strip the ends of the wires and poke them in the back of the outlets (back stab). The actual connection was very tiny and prone to failure, esp. under heavy loads like a space heater.

What you need to do is get a voltage tester, find the breaker that controls the recalcitrant circuit, be sure, using your voltage tester that the power is actually off, and start pulling out outlets, looking for damage like burn marks, melted plastic, etc.

Best practice to put them back together is to pig tail the connection (power in, power out, power to the outlet via the pig tail wire-nutted together, blacks to blacks and whites to whites). That way you don't count on the outlet itself to serve down stream outlets.

Be careful here, while this is a DIY site, it's up to you if you're comfortable doing this, if not, while we don't like saying this here, you might need to call a pro.

Answered by George Anderson on February 22, 2021

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