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[Ecrofirt]

To save a long story, my family is finally moving into the house we built and should have been in 7 months ago this week.

I moved a fridge down to the basement, and we hooked it up to an electrical socket. According to my mother, the fridge was still worknig when she went to bed the other night. Yesterday morning the fridge wouldn't work. I thought something might be fishy, so I got an extention cord and hooked the fridge up to a socket upstairs, and it's been worknig since.

I've since tried to flip every switch for the house on our circuit breaker, but the fridge still won't work on that socket. After that was beign screwy yesterday, I thought there might be somethnig wrong with the socket, so I unscrewed it from the wall. There were four wires inside, two black and two white. Only one of these whires was connected to the socket, a white one. Also upon unscrewing the socket, the lights started flickering immedietly, which let me know something was definitely not right with the wiring.

So anyway, with the power to the house off, I fiddled with the connections until I could get the lights working again. However, the fridge still doesn't work from that socket.

It's your normal everyday socket, but it's got test and reset buttons.

In the images below, I've tried to redraw what it looks like on the backside. the gold parts are the areas you can put wires into, and there appears to be one by each outlet on the socket. the red dot in the first picture is where the lone white wire was connected. The dots in the second pic are where I've got each wire connected now.

Here's what it looked like before:

Here's how it looks now:

Both before and after I did this, the test and reset switches were working.

Have I wired it correctly? I've never done this before. Can someone help?

 

[Vlad]

Well, I'm no pro, but I have done a good amount of minor electrical work around the house...

First off, go to Home Depot or something and buy some electrical testers. We actually have three different types of electrical testers in our house. We've got one of these:

You can plug this into any grounded (three prong) outlet, and it will tell you if it's wired correctly. They're pretty cheap (around $5, IIRC), and they're great for problems like you've got, where you're not sure if an outlet is wired correctly, or just not receiving power.

We've also got one of these:

It's called a Voltage Detector, and it'll tell you if an outlet or even a wire is receiving power. This is great as a troubleshooter, as you can just hold it to any point on the wire and it'll tell you if it's hot or not.

We've also got another thing that's essentially just two probes hooked up to a small light. You stick them in the two slots of an outlet and if the light is on, then you've got power. They're super-cheap, and while they can't take a reading through a wire like the thing I mentioned above, they're a nice way to check an outlet without taking it off the wall.

That said, I can't really say why you've got all those wires coming into the box in the first place. Typically, an outlet only needs three wires running to it, a white, black, and green (green being a ground wire). The white and black ones attach to the appropriate parts on the outlet, and the green usually loops around a green screw that's off to the side on the outlet (hard to explain). Also, the ground wire, instead of being in a green sheath, can also be just a bare copper wire.

Your outlet, with the reset and test buttons, sounds like it's a GFCI, which essentially functions like the thing you see on most hair dryers. If something plugged into that outlet shorts out, then it'll trip the breaker in the outlet and kill the power. Of course, that's if it's wired correctly. This is where the first tester I mentioned above comes into play. The thing is, as far as I know, you can't have a grounded outlet without a ground wire coming to it, and if there were only black and white wires running into the box, then you could potentially have a problem. When you get one of those testers, you really may want to test all the outlets in the house to make sure that they're properly grounded. If they're not, then you need to have a serious talking to with the people who did your electrical work.

And before I go any further, safety rule #1 when it comes to electrical work: always make sure that the thing you're working on has no power coming to it before you start unscrewing stuff from the wall. The fact that moving the outlet around a little bit made the lights start flickering makes me think that the circuit that that was on was still active (and not wired very well, either). Again, this is why you 100% need to have some way of checking stuff for voltage before you even think about doing any work on this stuff.

Unfortunately, I can't really help you any more without actually seeing what the wire configuration looks like. It's possible that all four wires were connected to the socket originally and just never tightened in there (again, I'm really wondering about the general quality of the work that you guys had done), or they were never tightened in the first place. If I had to guess, those extra two wires are supplying power to another outlet in the room. The one thing I can tell you for sure is that the outlet just plain won't work with only one white wire attached to it

If you've got a digicam, it may help to take a picture of both the back of the outlet, and the wire situation in the box.

 

[Ecrofirt]

We've got those here, but as we're moving they're packed away somewhere.

 

[calder]

OK, first thing - I haven't done any wiring in years. If you don't know what you're doing calling an electrician is the best thing to do and if you follow my quasi-advice below and burn down your house consider this my legal 'hey dont sue me'.

Test and reset buttons? Ok, that's a GFI (ground fault interupt I think) plug I'm guessing, and it makes things trickier than they need to be. GFI is used in kitchens and bathrooms - anywhere there would be a sink or water nearby.

I'm a bit confused about why there was only one white (neutral) wire on the plug to begin. You say there's two blacks and two whites now, which means that the power enters that box and then continues on. If it's a GFI plug it also means that whatever is powered down the line (after this plug) might need to be protected by the GFI plug by code. Does the back of the plug have LINE and LOAD (or something similar) written on it? The LINE is the power coming in and the LOAD is anything beyond that point *that will be protected by the GFI*. You can quite often put both black wires on the LINE which would mean that power contiues onward uninterupted but without the protection the GFI is meant to give.

There's a few variables here and I'm not sure how you'd best proceed. Is there a nearby sink/plumbing fixture in the area? Do you want the plug to be GFI protected if not? I'm a bit leery of the lights flickering, and this as much as anything has me leaning toward suggesting you call an electrician, not to mention the fact that if you change a GFI plug and in some way remove it's protection (either at that plug or further on) you would likely be violating your local building code if it was required, so if you did start a fire your insurance company would probably consider your policy void.

 

[Ecrofirt]

OK, first thing - I haven't done any wiring in years. If you don't know what you're doing calling an electrician is the best thing to do and if you follow my quasi-advice below and burn down your house consider this my legal 'hey dont sue me'.

Test and reset buttons? Ok, that's a GFI (ground fault interupt I think) plug I'm guessing, and it makes things trickier than they need to be. GFI is used in kitchens and bathrooms - anywhere there would be a sink or water nearby.

I'm a bit confused about why there was only one white (neutral) wire on the plug to begin. You say there's two blacks and two whites now, which means that the power enters that box and then continues on. If it's a GFI plug it also means that whatever is powered down the line (after this plug) might need to be protected by the GFI plug by code. Does the back of the plug have LINE and LOAD (or something similar) written on it? The LINE is the power coming in and the LOAD is anything beyond that point *that will be protected by the GFI*. You can quite often put both black wires on the LINE which would mean that power contiues onward uninterupted but without the protection the GFI is meant to give.

There's a few variables here and I'm not sure how you'd best proceed. Is there a nearby sink/plumbing fixture in the area? Do you want the plug to be GFI protected if not? I'm a bit leery of the lights flickering, and this as much as anything has me leaning toward suggesting you call an electrician, not to mention the fact that if you change a GFI plug and in some way remove it's protection (either at that plug or further on) you would likely be violating your local building code if it was required, so if you did start a fire your insurance company would probably consider your policy void.

The hot water heater is the only thing with water near this outlet. I'm also pretty sure the other wires were screwed in, but not tightly. That lone wire that was still connected when I unscrewed it from the wall was only connected loosly, and one of the other screws (the onw where I have the black wires plugged in now) was loose. The two screw areas that I didn't put wires into were tightly screwed shut, which also leads me to believe that the wiring just came loose.

The problem with all of this is we're now on our second contractor with this house. Our first guy screwed us and basically ran off with $20k or so and a house with many problems. THe foundation isn't suare, and the house isn't put on it correctly. He also didn't put enough rocks underneath it or something (as is my understanding) and our entire basement floor is cracked to hell from water underneath. We've got a problem with a HUGE crack in the foundation that lets in a massive amount of water whenever it rains. It gets worse. We were initially supposed to have a garage, but there's several reasons why we now don't have one. The first and foremost reason is because after we had our property surveyed(sp) our first contractor didn't come out until the day after he put the order in for the house to measure and make sure the garage would fit on our property. As it turns out, we were too close to the neighbors. The next biggest problem is that the guy made our basement too high. It stick up off the ground a good 5.5 feet, and if we were to put a garage in we'd need to build a really big slope into the property to accomodate(sp) it.

After this guy just disappeared we had to get a second contractor to finish the mess of a job that was our new home. The house is done now, but because of the stupid garage and a problem with the way the bank approved our contract we might not even get the money to finish paying this second contractor. It's a very hard thing to explain, but because of how the first guy ran off with $20k of our money, we're now only able to finish our upstairs on the money that was left over from what the bank gave us. This second contractor, when he's done with this and we get approved to re-finance our home, is supposed to finish our basement and put a deck on the house to hide some of the screw-ups the first guy made.

This leaves us with problems like this socket/outlet that won't be fixed until we can get the money to our contractor and he'll get them fixed for us. In the meantime, that thing is screwed up, and needed to be fixed. Thus, I tried and then came to GAF for help.

I'll try and get pics later tonight of the socket in question as well as some of the problems we have in the basement. If I can tomorrow I'll get a picture of the outside of the house where you can see how poorly it is resting on its foundation.

Now I'm headed back to the house with more things to move. Adios!

 

[Vlad]

The hot water heater is the only thing with water near this outlet. I'm also pretty sure the other wires were screwed in, but not tightly. That lone wire that was still connected when I unscrewed it from the wall was only connected loosly, and one of the other screws (the onw where I have the black wires plugged in now) was loose. The two screw areas that I didn't put wires into were tightly screwed shut, which also leads me to believe that the wiring just came loose.

Either way, that's not a good sign. An outlet (especially one that's just been installed) should have the screws tightened so that the wires don't just pop out like that, assuming you didn't do something silly like yank the thing from the wall or something.

This contractor, did he also do your electrical wiring? If so, then I'd be pretty worried, as he obviously didn't know what the hell he was doing (a lawsuit wouldn't be out of the question, honestly), and if your electrical work was done as poorly as the rest of the house, I wouldn't want to even plug anything in in that house.

If you do want to try and use the stuff, at least use a tester to make sure that all the outlets are properly wired and grounded.

 

[Crag Dweller]

If this is a new house you should have a warranty on parts and workmanship. Look in to that before you try to tackle it on your own.

 

[Vlad]

If this is a new house you should have a warranty on parts and workmanship. Look in to that before you try to tackle it on your own.

Yeah, but if his contractor really is as shady as it seems, he's going to have a hell of a time trying to actually get anything fixed.

 

[Crag Dweller]

That's true. Just pointing out another way available to resolve the problem.