Watts Up
Early last week, the bulb in my hallway light fixture went out. I changed the bulb, flipped the switch, and nothing happened. I didn’t have the time to do anything further about it until this weekend. I didn’t even worry about it until a friend of ours suggested that there could be a fire hazard lurking there. Well, the sum total of my knowledge about electrical things is “don’t stick your fingers in the socket,” so I was relieved when he offered to help me while he was visiting from out of town this weekend. He suggested that the easiest thing to do would be to replace the fixture, and as it’s both aesthetically offense and annoying to change the bulb, I readily agreed.
A quick trip to the hardware megastore netted us a light fixture, electrical tape, wire nuts, and a pair of compact fluorescent bulbs. The fixture assembly went well, aside from an aborted and not-strictly necessary attempt at soldering (soldering gun doesn’t work) and the fact that I can’t find my wire strippers. I turned off the appropriate circuit breaker. Our friend had the fixture wired up in short order, we put in the bulb I’d removed from the old fixture, flipped the switch and…nothing happened.
Our friend frowned a little and went back up the stepladder to have a second look. As he was reworking the wires, Ed came out of the master bedroom where he’d been watching football, and moved to the living room to watch. He completely failed to mention to us that the power had gone off in the bedroom. And, as it turned out, in the computer room, the master bath, and another bathroom…none of which are on the same circuit as the one whose breaker we’d flipped earlier. We looked at the circuit breakers panel, and nothing had flipped over. We experimented with the master switch, but didn’t get any results.
I called my dad to ask him to come over with his multimeter, so that we could test the fixture and switches, while our friend called his dad for advice. He came over with his meter, and started checking not only the fixture and the aswitches, but outlets in other parts of the house. Mysteriously, the power came back on in the master bath, but nowhere else. The results of the tests didn’t get us any less confused, and our friend sat down on the couch, sketching and mumbling to himself about circuits and switches. Finally, we admitted defeat, and I called some other friends of mine who’ve had a lot of work done on their house, and asked for the name of their electrician.
As we all know, nothing simple is ever easy, and after two phone calls and forty minutes, we hadn’t heard back from the recommended electrician, whose answering machine firmly instructed me to keep the line clear for the next fifteen minutes so that the dispatcher could return the call. While I was waiting, I remembered that I’d had a problem with the same areas a several months ago, and actually managed to retrieve the work order. Sure enough, last February, I’d had an outlet replaced and the GFI breakers reset for the same areas that had mysteriously gone out. Figuring that Hell might freeze over—and I don’t mean the one in Michigan—before we heard from electrician #1, I gave up and called the company that had done the previous repair.
Our friend went back to the hardware store to buy his own multimeter, and Ed encouraged me to lie down for a while to help the headache I’d developed for some reason. While I was lying down, Ed and our friend went back to tinkering with the fixture and the circuit breakers, and by the time I got up, we were back to status quo ante project—by which I mean that the lights were all on, except for that same fixture. Our friend had to head back to Louisville, but we did promise to call him as soon as we knew what the actual problem was.
It took the electrician over an hour to arrive, but when he got there, he was able to go right to work, as we’d left all the switch plates off, the fixture open, and the stepladder in the hall. He looked at our friend’s work, checked both switches and the fixture for current, and checked the wiring again. He replaced the wire nuts, and tightened up a loose neutral wire. Still no result. Finally, he asked me if we had another lightbulb. Ed opened up the package of compact fluorescents, and the electrician put it into the new fixture. I held my breath as Ed flipped the switch.
It worked. The entire problem had been caused by a defective light bulb.
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