Have you ever had an issue where the receptacles in your house just stopped working all of a sudden? In this video, I'm going to show you a couple different things that you can check really quick. I'll also show you what we found out in our house, how we fixed the problem and why it was actually a really big deal. The first thing kind of goes without saying, but make sure you check your electrical panel or your fuse box to make sure the issue isn't there. If you have a tripped breaker, it's a really easy process of just flipping the breaker off and flipping it back on again to get your receptacles working.

If you're in a location like a bathroom and you have a receptacle that isn't GFCI protected, it might actually be connected to another GFCI outlet.

So check and make sure they're not tripped. And if they are, reset them. If the receptacle isn't in a bathroom and it isn't working and you live in an older home, say, a home that has two prong receptacles or one that has some two prong receptacles and some three prong, then your receptacle still might be protected by a GFCI. It's a good idea to check in different rooms or different locations that are closer to your breaker panel to see if there are any GFCI's that are protecting the entire circuit.

If it is, then you simply have to reset that GFCI protection and your receptacle should start working.

If you check the breaker panel, that's not a problem, and you also have checked to make sure there aren't any GFCI's that are tripped, then the most likely cause is you have a loose connection on one of the receptacles. Now, since receptacles are daisy chained, you could have an issue with only one receptacle, or you could have an issue with multiple and it could still be the same problem. Even lights could be on the same circuit and powered off of a receptacle. So you're going to have to check the electrical connections inside the wall in order to understand if this is truly the issue.

Now, even though you don't have power, it's still a good idea to double-check with one of these testers.

If you're still not getting any power on the receptacles with one of these, I would go ahead and take off the cover of one of the receptacles and test to see if there's any power in that box whatsoever. In order to see if there's any power in the box itself, then you're going to have to use a non contact voltage detector like this one here, and I'm going to show you what this looks like because I actually have this problem right now. My kids came to me the other day and they said, hey, none of the receptacle outlets are working in our bedroom, so in my case, I've gone ahead and I've checked the breaker panel.

Everything looks fine there. I also know that there aren't any GFCI receptacles protecting the ones in this bedroom.

So the next thing I'm going to do, test these in the room with one of these testers, and then I'm going to pull off the covers and I'm going to test it with one of these. So I'm going to plug this in here. And actually it lights up. So that's interesting. But it lights up wrong.

So it shows that since these two are lit, that the hot and the ground are reversed, which is really weird. If this was correct on this one, these two lights will light up as you can see here on this legend. So we know that there's a problem here. No matter what. If we check the bottom one, we get the same result.

So I'm going to check another receptacle in the room and see what the results are with those. All right, so here's another receptacle. Let's see what this does. All right. So this one says open neutral.

All right. So now this receptacle in this room shows that everything is okay. These two lights are lit up. All right. So I've shut the power off to the room, and you can see these lights are lit up at this point.

The other interesting thing is the second time I plugged this in is it showed that it was also an open neutral. So this might not be the location where the issue is, but this is the location that the kids keep a space heater plugged into. So I have a feeling this is where the problem lies. Before we take it out all the way, I'm going to use this non-contact voltage tester to make sure there isn't any live power coming into this box. I've tested this on an actual live circuit beforehand to make sure that everything with the tester is functioning.

And since I'm not getting a power reading here, this should be safe to pull this receptacle out and take a look. All right. So pull this out and look for any issues here. Everything looks okay. These are backstabbed wires.

And since this is also a location where the heater was plugged in, I assume this would be the failure point, but it looks like it's not. So I'm going to put this back in here, and I'm going to check out one of the other receptacles. Take a look here, and it looks like this is the end of the circuit. This is the end of the run because you've only got two wires coming in to this receptacle. So since nothing is Daisy chained off of it going out of the box to power another receptacle, we know this is not the issue.

We also know that the other one that we just checked is in the middle. So we are narrowing this down as to which one is the problem. And so we're going to go back to the other one that looks like it tested fine. We're going to take it out of the wall. And I have a feeling that's where the problem lies.

This is the one that tested just fine. And as you can see here, we have a pretty significant problem. You can see these wires are burned right here. They burned all the way through this wing nut or this wire nut where this is pigtailed in here. It looks like this shorted out.

Not sure what caused that, but this is where the problem is. So we're going to go ahead and take this apart. Hopefully, we can just replace this wire nut that's bad and then cut off these wires and replace it. I'm going to get this out of the way here, and look, see it came right out and you can see these wires are fused together here. It looks like everything on the hot side is fine.

When I say that you can see that it burned through some of this hot wire right here. So since this happened, I'm going to have to replace this wire as well just to make sure everything's fine. It looks like everything back inside the box is fine. We just have a problem up here. All right.

So I've got some spare 14/2. So I'm going to cut off a section of this and get this to where we can go ahead and wire this receptacle in the same way that it was again. Since this piece is into this wire nut, we're going to have to cut this off because this is damaged here. And since this black hot wire has some damaged insulation, I'm going to replace this at the same time. Just going to cut off a section here.

Now, normally, with this kind of wire, you'd have to cut the outer sheathing in order to be able to access the wires that are on the inside. But since this is going to be used for some pigtail connections, I can go ahead and just pull this out from the sheathing without having to cut it. We don't need the ground wire in this case. And that's this one here wrapped in this paper. We do need this white neutral wire.

And this black hot wire. Going to go ahead and get these wires stripped and ready to use.

So there's our wires that are ready to go. We've got insulation stripped off of both ends. So now I'll disconnect this ground wire. All right. So the other thing I'm going to do is I'm actually not going to reuse this receptacle.

I'm going to replace it. Now I can cut these wires off.

Get that out of the way. I'm going to undo this hot wire and I'm going to replace this one with the new one that I prepped. Put this in place here. I take my needle nose pliers and wrap these around, get it ready for the wire nut.

All right, pull on this. Make sure everything seems nice and tight. Now, for this one I'm just going to go ahead and cut this wire off and strip the wire that's in the wall. And then on these wires. While I hate cutting off wire that's in the wall, I have to in this case, because this is just so bad.

So I'm just going to cut this off. Same thing as before. Going to strip these wires. Then I'm going to put all these wires together, all the ones that were in the box. And I'm going to include this jumper wire that I prepared and put this here, too. I'm going to get this all set up the same way it was when we took it apart. Hold these wires together, take my needle nose pliers, grab all these wires and twist them together.

Take a new wire nut put this on. All right. And again, give us a test. Make sure this nut doesn't pull off here. Now, with this new receptacle, I'm not going to backstab this again.

It's really a bad practice. If you have these connections, it's better to side-wire them. And so that's what I'm going to do here. First, I'm going to make my ground wire connection.

All right. So I'm just going to take my needle nose pliers and grab the end of this wire and bend this over. Make a J hook. Do the same thing with this white neutral wire. Bend it over, make a hook.

The brass is the hot side. So we want to connect the black wire to brass. We'll hook this over, do the same thing. We'll flip this over and hook this neutral wire into the neutral or the silver side. I'm going to take these screws out.

And for good measure, I'm going to wrap this with electrical tape a couple of times to make sure these connections are covered. All right. So all the receptacles are back in place. And I went and flipped on the breaker. Now we're going to test this and make sure everything is good.

And you can see here the proper two lights light up so everything is fine and back in place. Now, you might be wondering what could have caused this to happen in the first place. In our case, it could have been a couple of different things. One, this is a bedroom where a boy sleep and we have a space heater in here to help keep them warm at night. This with other things plugged into the circuit, could have overloaded the circuit and caused an issue.

Now, while that could have been a contributing factor to the problem, most likely, the issue was a loose connection in the wall. If the wires inside the wire nut are loose, this could cause the electricity to arc, which would generate heat and potentially cause a fire. This can happen, especially if the receptacle is used quite a bit. And if it's loose inside the wall or it's not tight then it can move around. Over time this can loosen the connection and can cause the situation that we ran into. Now

thankfully, it wasn't as big of a deal as it could have been. Like I said, this is in our boys bedroom, and these things can cause house fires. Luckily, in our case, it only caused a couple of wires to melt together and it created a repair job I wasn't expecting. Hopefully you found this video helpful. If you did, don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. At the Top Homeowner.

It's goal to help you become the very best homeowner that you can be. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.