Understanding Your Circuit Breakers

One of the most common electrical troubles that you will run into is going to be a tripped circuit breaker of a blown fuse.

You should know where your circuit breakers or fuse box are located well in advance and become some what familiar with it.

Do not wait till you have no lights and then run around the house in dismay or panic not knowing what to do. Most of the time if you loose lights or power in one of the rooms of your house you will just have to re-set your circuit breaker or change your fuse.

Inside your circuit breaker box you will see a bunch of black items that look like switches that move left to right or side to side. When a breaker is tripped you should see a red indicator on the left side of the breaker switch itself. Most breaker switches are designed this way, although I have seen some that do not show this and the only way you will know that it is tripped is by re-setting the breaker.

Re-setting the breaker is simply done by switching from left to right, you will hear a distinct click as you do this, that is the point of re-setting.

There are many reasons that a circuit breaker will trip but, the most common of them will be overloading a circuit. What I mean by this is you are trying to run too many things on one circuit. How many times have you plugged in your hair dryer and lost power to the bathroom? Most likely you may have had a curling iron plugged in at the same time. Both of these small appliances are high wattage items and most likely cannot be run at the same time. Another example could be the coffee maker and the microwave in the kitchen.

As you get familiar with your circuit breakers you should label them so you know what each one is for hopefully this will be already done for you, but if not this is easy to do. You can do this with a helper and the easiest way is to turn on a light in the room that you are trying to identify. Then start switching the breakers to the off state. When the light in that particular room goes out then you know you have found the correct breaker for that room.

Usually on the door of the breaker box there should be an area where you can write on so you can identify each breaker, if not be creative and draw yourself a diagram which you or anyone in the household can understand. These tips should help you when the lights go out the next time, and you won't have to panic while trying to figure things out.

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