Electrons: an uphill flow

It was a troubling concept that my classmates and I encountered in Electrical Engineering 101.  We were being told that electrons flow in the opposite direction from the electrical current in a circuit.  Yes, electrons move “uphill” from low voltage to high, but the “current” goes from positive to negative.

I suspect that the individual who wired This Odd House may have been a classmate who didn’t quite get it.  I have heard of cases where a homeowner, confident in his skills, connects the wires to the right places and successfully makes the lights turn on, but is oblivious to the codes and conventions that make the wiring safe and maintainable.

In this house I have witnessed it firsthand.  Whatever plan was behind it, and its execution, was entirely done by amateurs.  I am confident that no electrical inspector has ever seen these wires.

I was recently spooked by an outlet in the kitchen, the outlet in the kitchen, the outlet critical for making coffee each morning.  It suddenly became inactive, dead– no voltage, no electrons.  It had been working fine, but now it had no power.  What had changed?

I had been examining the wiring in a crawl space elsewhere in the house (and had observed more scary naked splices), and the kitchen had just been painted, which involved taking off outlet and switch plate covers, but these actions seemed benign.

I confirmed that no fuse had blown, no circuit breaker had tripped.  I got advice that maybe it was downstream from a GFI outlet (ground fault interrupter) commonly used in bathrooms and kitchens, so I searched the entire house and checked and reset them all.  The outlet remained dead.

I was preparing to do remote camera inspection of the wiring to see how the outlet got its power, and thinking about cutting holes in the walls and ceiling in order to do this.  As I reviewed my options, I wondered why the refrigerator, sitting right next to the dead outlet, was still running.  Why were they on different circuits?

I pulled the refrigerator out from its home position.  Like most refrigerators, it was plugged into an outlet directly behind it.  I noticed that the outlet was upside down from the usual orientation, with the ground pin on top.  This isn’t a problem, the electrons still know which way to flow, but it did require that the plug on the power cord had to be connected from above rather than from below.  The cable ran across the other half of the duplex outlet, and when I unplugged the refrigerator I discovered test and reset buttons that uniquely identified it as a GFI outlet!

As an EE, I understand the purpose for GFI outlets and how they work.  They protect me from accidental short circuits to ground when I am using an appliance that is plugged into it.  They work like a local fast-acting circuit breaker.  Whenever they sense that the current is improperly flowing elsewhere (like through your body into the water of a sink or bathtub), the circuit breaker inside the outlet trips and you avoid being electrocuted.  This is a very nice feature to have.

But the risk of a short circuit from my refrigerator seems very remote.  I don’t know of anyone accidentally dropping one into a sink.  And if the GFI actually were to trip, how would I know it?  Ok, the refrigerator light wouldn’t go on, and eventually my ice cubes would melt.  How would I then know to pull out the refrigerator and access the outlet to reset it?  I think I would first go searching for the fuse in the service panel that had blown.

Yes, eventually after finding no blown fuses, I would figure it out.  And that is what was happening now.  But it wasn’t the refrigerator that was dead, it was a completely different outlet.  What I discovered was that the refrigerator plug and its power cord had touched the GFI “test” button just enough to disable all downstream outlets, but still keep the GFI outlet itself fully powered (I don’t actually see how this is possible– it seems like a faulty design to me).

My reconstruction of what happened is this:  the painter pulled out the refrigerator to paint the kitchen walls.  When it was pushed back into place, the GFI outlet was semi-triggered.  The refrigerator continued running, but the downstream outlet was cut off.  It was a week until I figured this out.  A week of making coffee at a remote outlet.

The fix was to replace the outlet behind the refrigerator.  I installed a standard outlet, right side up, to replace the GFI that should never have been there in the first place.

I am now able to enjoy my morning coffee in the kitchen and contemplate what next uphill battle I will face at This Odd House.  I suspect it will involve electrons.