Bathroom Outlets Quit Working during rain


  #1  
Old 10-29-06, 09:34 PM
D
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Bathroom Outlets Quit Working during rain

Recently we had rain for about 24 hours straight. During that time I tried to plug in my curlers in my master bath. I pressed the test, reset button several times on the outlet, but the the button kept popping out and the outlet would not work. Our second bath doesn't have the same kind of test/reset button, but it didn't work either. I tried the outlet we have outdoors and it didn't work either.

To my knowledge, all of the other outlets in the house were working properly.

About an hour after this incident with my curlers, the outlets were working properly again.

Is this a problem that needs to be repaired, or is this to be expected when there is a lot of rain?

Thank you.
 
  #2  
Old 10-30-06, 02:42 AM
J
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It sounds like your outside gfi is filling up with water.

this needs to be fixed.
 
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Old 10-30-06, 03:54 AM
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To carry it one step further, the outside receptacle may incorrectly be protected by the bathroom GFCI, and like Jwhite said it is getting wet and tripping the one in the bath, which also controls the other bath receptacles. The outside receptacle should be on its own circuit and protected by GFCI and have an "in-use" cover on it.
 
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Old 10-30-06, 04:30 AM
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Larry's statement is a bit premature. In years past, it was allowed to have the bathroom recepacles on the same circuit as other receptacles.. Then it was quite common to have the bathroom chare a circuit with the garage, basement and.or outdoor recetacles. Further, they complicated things (but made it cheaper for them to install) by placing one GFCI receptacle to protect the entire circuit. We get posts here all the time by people who have no idea why their bathroom receptacles don't work, and it's because the GFCI in the garage is tripped.

Anyway, if your wiring was code legal when it was installed, it is code legal today.

Yes, this sounds very much like the outdoor receptacles are getting wet, tripping the GFCI and when it dries out they are working again.

The ultimate fix is to separate the circuits. Hwoever, that may be more than you want to do. Instead, I suggest placing GFCIs at all the locations on the circuit and only using the LINE termianls of all the GFCIs. For the outdoor receptacles I then recomment in use covers (which are also a fairly recent addition to code).
 
 

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