Brian wrote:
Jeffrey wrote:
Hello everyone. Just had a quick question. Our house is only 2 years
old and up until a couple motnhs ago everything seemed to work fine as
far as electricity is concerned. Mysteriously, in our bedroom, 3
sockets stopped working. It was not a breaker, nor a GFCI, etc....Just
these three. Over at home depot I picked up a little tester with the 3
lights that tells what is wrong supposedly. In two of the 3 I got
Hot/Ground Reverse and in one I got Open Neutral. So, in my thinking I
could just open up the sockets and switch the hot ground on the 2 and
then connect the presumed detached neutral on the other. But there has
got to be a reason this happened on 3 at the same time. Is there anyone
out there who can point me in the right direction?

Did you have a home inspection? If this was a problem from the get-go..
I would of thought an inspector would have caught this. The sockets may
be bad if they are going now.

All good advice. Thanks so much guys. I suspect that it is a crappy
tester. It was only a few bucks, so go figure. There were not
hot/ground reverses. After a couple seconds the readings went to open
neutral on all 3 which makes sense to my non-electrician mind since
they are daisy chained. As mentioned previously, there must have been
some leakage which caused it to see hot/ground reverse. I have begun
the process of replacing those with the backstabbed connections. I
actually had an electrician come over and he had the plates off
checking each one and he found a loose neutral and then everything
seemed to work. He screwed them all back in and left. After he left
they did not work anymore so I suspect that it worked after testing
only because the wires got jossled and made a connection until they
were screwed back into the plates. Either way, I turned off the breaker
to my room and I am going to replace them all with screw versions....If
backstabs suck so much, why are they used? Just to save time I guess
and builders seem to live by the phrase, "well, that's code."
Anyways, perhaps I am going about this all wrong, but my first time
troubleshooting this type of issue...Unless the issue is
computer-related, I'm a fish out of water....Thanks everyone,