This morning, in the bathroom off our master bedroom, three electrical outlets along one wall, two on the sides of the double sink, one next to the toilet, suddenly stopped working. Overhead lights, shower exhaust, lights over the sink, etc., continue to work. Outlets in bedroom and another adjacent room work, too. Checked the circuit breaker box in the garage, and all circuits on. Reset the master bedroom circuit breaker anyway. No luck.

What's going on?

Update: Same situation in the bathroom next to our guest bedroom on the other side of our second floor. Two outlets on both sides of double sink are out, as is the outlet next to the toilet. (We had an electrician add the outlets next to the toilets when we bought the place in 2020 in order to install toilet seat bidets.)

I'd check the ground fault outlet that probably feeds the other 2 outlets.

Im not an electrician but you may have lost a phase in your Panel.Hopefully someone else with more knowledge chimes in. Are all the none working circuits on one side of electrical panel???

The outlets in the bathrooms should be GFCI outlets, and should have a resettable button in the middle of the outlet itself. If you have this type of outlet, check to see that the resettable buttons are pushed in.

You may also have GFCI breakers in the breaker box for the bathroom circuits, they may trip but not appear to entirely in the trip position, if you have those, I would try resetting those as well.

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Too soon old, too late smart

All my outside outlets stopped working once. No breakers were tripped.

After pondering the situation, I thought I'd check my garage outlets. One GFCI outlet had tripped. After resetting it, everything was cool. Never had a problem since.

This happened to my son. The GFCI was in the second bathroom. They like to hook all of them up together with one GFCI that covers them all.

To add a video to post #4.
No one should be allowed to graduate high school without the ability to safely troubleshoot the electrical system in a house.

Maybe even Old Sparky in the Big House?

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Have Fun/Stay Safe

If the GFCI outlets are daisy chained, a loose/bad neutral or hot wire can stop the outlets down the chain.
Not having a diagram of the wiring, plus having it updated with additions and changes, makes it more difficult for the average homeowner to figure things out safely.
Always wear rubber soled shoes.
We would always update and correct all wiring diagrams, after completing our work on boats, show it to the owner/Capt, make sure they understand everything, and they payed the bill with a smile and thanks.
Some worked with us to learn.
We joke that the best techs are on Subs.

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Have Fun/Stay Safe

Echoing….the GFCI may not be in a what would seem obvious place. Check them all and reset the tripped one.

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Sure you did

A tripped GCFI at the beginning of the circuit chain that cannot be reset will shut off power at every other receptacle or light downstream of it. Only one GFCI is needed to protect the entire circuit. That is a good thing as a ground fault anywhere in the circuit will trip the GFCI and kill the entire circuit. You can temporarily reactivate the dead circuit by making up a double plug extension cord and plugging it in to connect a live circuit to the dead circuit. But only until you can replace the defective GFCI. I have done that and it works. I keep a double plug extension cord for just that emergency use. I keep a couple of new GFCI receptacles in my workshop just in case. They are cheap, around $10. And far cheaper than calling an electrician. Same thing with circuit breakers. I keep several spares of those too, very simple to replace. Just watch a YouTube video if you don't already know how to do it.

Thanks very much guys.

Just got home, checked this thread, tried to find a tripped GFCI outlet, looked all over, and, sure enough, found one in the garage. Pushed the button in, and now all is good in the second floor bathrooms.

S&W Forum to the rescue again!

Hubba hubba!

We saved you a service call.

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Sure you did

You guys sure did, Mike. Thanks very much!

This one, in my laundry room, is for the condensate pump in the crawl space. IE pumps the water created by the first floor A/C unit outside.
I had to have it wired to its own circuit as it was interfering with my thermostat. House got hot one day and I ouldnt figure why until I saw the red light
I think it killed the doorbell too.




This one, as wood714’s, is in my garage and controls the outside lights and receptacles. Took me awhile to figure why my lights were going out.

No one told me anything when we moved into our new house.

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Sure you did

Don't bother asking the contractor on a new home. When ma-in-law#1 moved into her new home in Vegas in 1989, she had to hunt for the receptacle that was connected to the light switch. Some checking with neighbors it was different in every house, even those of the same design. I think the contractors messed with this stuff deliberately to break the boredom of building tract homes.

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Release the Kraken

Now find out why it tripped. May need to be replaced.

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Life Is A Gift. Defend it!

When my mom was moving from Haines City to Ormond Beach. I had the movers put her full size freezer on the screened in patio. It was stuffed full of beef, and fish...the last fish my dad caught before dying.

She was in the hospital at the time dealing with her 4th broken hip. I was going back and forth arranging her furniture and putting stuff away.

Went down one day, and there was a bloody mess in front of the freezer. Turns out a GFCI outlet on the side of her house went to the outlet I plugged the freezer into. Filled 3 black trash bags full of ruined meat.

There’s a tripped gfci outlet somewhere in your house that feeds those outlets that are out. Check the bathrooms,the kitchen and the garage for it.
Edit: if that isn’t it you may have a loose nuetral,but my own experience with that is losing power temporarily over and over again

Hmm. What are the potential reasons for it to trip?

Couple of the guys above appear to have one offs....

Uh-oh.

Edited to add: That "Do GFCIs Go Bad" thread is enlightening. Maybe the problem is that it is old. Think I'll wait and see if it happens again.

All weaken the link and they trip below their intended threshold.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

In my experience breakers trip for many reasons and a one off is no big deal. If it continues to trip get someone to check it out. It is a symptom of a problem that should be investigated. It is never a good idea to continually reset a breaker. Just my .02 FWIW.

A long time ago I was warned about entrance panel GFCI circuit breakers. Don't recall the specific technical reason, but having to go into the EP to replace is a major pain.

Since then I've wired several barns. The first, I used individual GFCI outlets, only needed 5. 3 covered outlets for 2 stalls each (fans), one was a service receptacle for the aisleway and the last covered the tack room. That was nearly 30 years ago and I've replaced one. Very, very occasionally, one or 'tother will trip without load. Humidity?

The 2 much larger builds used a separate GCFI (wall mounted near the breaker panel in one, in the aisleway right by the light switches in the other) to handle all the stall receptacles. There were enough of those I didn't need service receptacles. [Each stall had it's own dedicated receptacle] Come to think of it, the receptacles in the tack room/water heater/water tank rooms had individual GFCI outlets-one each.

You never know how long a breaker will last. In this one large fab shop I worked in did not have a wall switch that turned on the very large, very many overhead lights. They were run from the service panel. Every work day morning the one breaker was turned on, end of day shut off. I worked there for 9 years and that breaker worked fine.-

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14 S&W Revs none with locks!

GFI's don't have the same robust construction and endurance that a Square D 20 amp breaker does. Here in he south I've heard that high humidity can make one trip that is located in, say, a garage where it can be exposed to the moisture.

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- Change it back -

Back when my Dau was in HS, she would dry her hair and spray it at the same time.
She gummed up her hair dryer and it tripped the GFI.
So get a new hair dryer and reset the GGI!
Could not find it!
After a lot of looking, finally found it about 60 feet away.
In the garage, opposite end of the house, behind some boxes on a shelf.
I won’t bore you with other sagas in the GFI chronicles.
But I do have other tales of the GFI.

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

The purpose of of a GFCI is a little different from that of a fuse or circuit breaker in that it is much quicker to trip. That is to safeguard humans from electrocution. A circuit breaker is slower, and is intended to prevent overheating of a shorted circuit and preventing a structure fire. But there are GFCI circuit breakers.

They are essentially a couple of ampmeters in the form of small coils. One is around the hot and neutral lines and the current in both SHOULD cancel out any measurement and should read zero. If the logic circuit detects current, it trips a solenoid cutting power. There is also a coil around the neutral and ground to detect leakage there.

I would presume that the logic chip is sensitive to overvoltage and age and weakens over time. It's good that when old and start to fail they trip early rather than later.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

Good point worth much more than $0.02
Then again there's always another solution.

Attached Images

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That's cute but it doesn't work .