2 Bad Outlets on Circuit

[jbelia]

I have a 7-year old home in California. My master bath (upstairs) has only two outlets above the sink. Both don't work. All of the outlets and lights in the rest of the house work fine. No breakers are tripped, and no GFI outlets in the house that I can find are tripped.

At first I thought (or was hoping) that one of the outelts was bad and resutling in the other downstream outlet no working. However, after inspecting the wires in the box, it looks like the wires enter the box and go into a wire nut, were two wires come out, one to the receptacle and one that exits the box going to the other outlet in the bathroom. If I understand the circuits correctly, even if the outlet in the middle of the circuit went bad, power would still be flowing to the other outlet because of the splice at the wire nut. So it appears that the problem is somewhere else (before the first bad outlet).

From what I've found, all the outlets in the house appear to be the type with the wires pushed into the back.

Also, an interesting observation: My house has two bathrooms upstairs (one master and one spare), one bathroom downstairs, and the kitchen is downstairs. However, out of those 4 rooms, there are only 2 GFI outlets. I thought the building code (in California) required a GFI in every room where water was present?

A few questions:
1. Is it possible that an outlet could still work, but somehow break the circuit causing all of the outlets downstream to have no power?
2. Is it possible that the master bath outlets share a circuit with either the other upstairs bath, the garage, or the kitchen downstairs? And if so, is it possile that the GFI outlet (or some other outle) in one of those rooms is faulting and causing a break in the circuit, even thought all outlets in those rooms have power?

I would like to trouble shoot this problem as much as possilbe before paying big bucks to an electrician to come in and find some simple problem.

Any advice, hints, recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[handyandy]

One thing I have learned with electricity is anything is possible. One person here at the forums found a gfci outlet under his sink. I have heard of outlets not working and it being traced to the other end of the house.

I am not sure about California code but a good rule of thumb is to have gfci outlets anywhere within 6 feet of water.

It is possible that a gfi outlet in another area of the house is causing the problem.

Are those outlets on a switch? Have they recently worked? What has changed?

There are better people around here to help you. Rewired? CaptainBob?

Let us know how it goes!

[Jimmer]

jbelia,

Welcome to the forum, Andy is right, you are likely to find the most interesting things when trying to trace out electrical circuits.

I am willing to bet that somewhere in or outside of your house is a GFCI outlet that is tripped. Now all you have to do is find it.

It is possible for a wire to come loose of the connecter and stop the flow downstream while the other 'pigtail' is okay and feeding the outlet in that box.

I am not sure of the Calf building code but you are probably aware that one GFCI can protect additional outlets if the proper connection is used at the GFCI. You probably have three actual GFCI's in you house that protect all the standard outlets that are supposed to be protected.

Good luck, Jim

'Just a handyman trying to help'

[nates]

when we have problems like this it is usualy because the customer has added or replaced something and not connected all of the wires good enough. has anything been changed?

nate

[mrcaptainbob]

Are you new to this house or been there for a while? Have they worked for you in the past?