Ook wrote:
I have lost an entire circuit - 6 dead outlets, 2 dead switches, all along
one set of walls. All of the breakers are good, I even tested the wires
coming out of the breakers to make sure they were hot (wife bought me a
nifty no contact bells and whistles dvm ), and all it tells me is that
all of the hot wires are really hot. There are no wires running to the area
in the basement, and the attic is open and I don't see any wires there
either. I'm not really sure where the circuit is fed from, and tearing out
walls isn't an option. Any suggestions on how to find where the wire that
feeds the circuit comes from? Are there any devices that can detect wires
behind sheetrock, or otherwise allow you to trace wires without tearing the
wall apart? This should not be difficult, but so far I've got a dead circuit
and no idea where it gets fed from.



Actually, a good quality no-contact electric sensor will read behind
sheetrock pretty well. At least my LiveWire GVD-505A does. I've used it
a few times to trace wires through ceilings and walls.

You seem to have two possibilities: 1) the circuit is broken between the
breaker and the first box where it branches out or 2) the circuit is
broken in that first box itself.

In the first case you are going to have a nasty job ahead of you and
will probably wind up tearing into walls and ceilings to fix it (or
paying someone else to do it for you). Luckily, in my experience anyway,
this is the less likely problem.

Virtually every time I check a problem like this it is a matter of a
wire coming loose at the first outlet/switch before the dead section.
This is often caused by the original installer using the back-stab
connections which, true to their name, come back after a few years and
stab you in the back. If it truly is the entire circuit which is dead
I'd start looking in the box which is physically closest to the breaker
as that is the most likely location since it usually results in shorter
runs and makes the job cheaper.

Oh, and one other thing I just though of: if you have any GFCI (ground
fault circuit interrupters) in your house, check each of them. I
actually found a house once where someone looking for a convenient
source of power tapped off of a GFCI in a bathroom and fed it to the
lights and ceiling fans in two adjacent bedrooms. It took a lot of head
scratching to finally figure out than a tripped GFCI killed the power.

--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
http://johnmcgaw.com