Ook wrote:
Mystery solved. After spending HOURS AND HOURS remove every single miserable
switch and outlet in the house, examining all of the wires, and finding
nothing, I was seriously considering tearing the wall out to see where the
wire went. So, I walked outside to cool off because it was warm in the
house. I stood there, thinking, wondering what to do next. I turned around
and faced the house, looking up at the top of the wall where I knew the dead
wire dissappeared. I looked down...and there I saw, on the outside of the
house, directly underneath where I knew the wire vanished into the wall, an
outlet! Not only was it an outlet, but it was a GFCI that had tripped!

So, anyhow - the short of it is, someone had wired the circuit through this
GFCI on the outside of the house such that when the GFCI tripped, it shut
off the entire circuit. All of the outlets in the frontroom, and half the
outlets in the master bedroom came through that GFCI. Ten days of hell
because of this miserable GFCI on the outside of the house....

Oh, BTW, I also found that the other circuit in the bedroom did have a bad
ground - totally unrelated to this problem, but nice to know. I also
replaced two switches and rewired about a half a dozen outlets because they
were backstabbers or just poorly wired - short wires, sloppy wiring, etc.



"Ook" Ook Don't send me any freakin' spam at zootal dot com delete the
Don't send me any freakin' spam wrote in message
...
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.




Well, it makes me feel better than my reply contained:

"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."

Sometimes you just gotta' get it right (even if you do misspell "thought".

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