More Electricity

Garage Lights Including Light in Closet

Went out to the new house yesterday intending to fix the lights that we intended to fix last weekend.

Casablanca Ceiling Fan Name Plate

We got the interior lights sorted, except for the ones on the ceiling fan. I picked up a new fan controller at Home Depot hoping it would work with this fan, but the new controller has 4 wires and the old one only has 2. How are they controlling the fan and the lights with only two wires? Must be some kind of mystical electronic B.S. I did get a photo of the name plate so I should be able  to figure out what kind of controller I need.

The light in the closet in the garage wasn't working. It wasn't the bulb, the socket, the switch or a tripped circuit breaker. We finally realized that the neutral wire wasn't neutral, it wasn't connected to anything. We could have just used the ground, but that's not really kosher. After some pondering, I realized there was probably a junction somewhere where the white wire was failing to connect, but where? The Romex cable disappears into the wall and who knows where it goes after that. Well, I'm gonna find that junction, so I take the saber saw and start cutting holes in the drywall. I'm Ahab and I'm gonna get that white wire. And ain't no literary allusions gonna dissuade me from my mission. 

Space between roof & drywall over garage. Rafter on the right. 
Just to the left of where the Romex goes through hole in rafter there is a small white square. 
That is the outlet box that holds the bad, bad outlet.

The Romex goes up the wall, across the ceiling to garage wall, up the wall to the roof and then down along the rafter to the outlet that supplies power to the garage door opener. We traced its progress by sticking the smart phone into the hole in the wall and taking pictures.

'Disassembled' Bad Outlet Showing Broken Fingers

This outlet was the culprit. Outlets these days are supplied with two methods on connecting to the power lines. There are screw terminals and there are holes with spring loaded fingers that capture the bare wire ends. The problem outlet had no screws, it only had finger captures, and a couple of the fingers had broken.

Negative image of patch, cropped from image at top of this post. 
Black screws show up as white here.

We cut half a dozen holes in the drywall to trace this wire. Alternatively we could have just pulled every outlet and switch in the garage until we found the culprit, but that is assuming the problem was even in the garage. It could have been anywhere. Cutting the holes enabled us to go directly to the source of the problem. We put back the pieces we cut out by screwing sticks across the backside of the hole and the screwing the cutouts to the sticks. We cut half a dozen holes and the patches still need to be spackled but we're getting good at that.

P.S. I think blogger has changed the default text size relative to the size of the images, so I'm going to try using large instead of extra large and see if that restores some balance between image size and text size. As usual, clicking on an image should take you to a full size version, or right click and open in a new tab, which is my preferred method.