On Fri, 13 May 2011 18:01:23 -0400, "John Grabowski"
wrote:

I had an outage due to my own ****ing foolishness. Flipped the
relevant breaker & all was well -- I thought.

Went to watch a little TV before sleep; whole "entertainment center"
dark. Traced it to wall outlet which powered the whole shebang. So
now great big yellow power cord trailing across bedroom floor to
unaffected outlet.

My few attempts at installing new outlets in another room didn't work
out too great (though I followed instructions exactly), and I can ill
afford to pay an electrician to do the job.

Is this do-able by a non-techie?

(Also, why just that one outlet fried?)

Wasn't that the outlet where you were foolish?


*Shut off the power to that circuit and take the outlet apart to see what's
going on inside.

When I was just out of college, my girlfriend's friend asked how I
fixed things, and I said, Well first you look at it until you
understand it.

Twenty years later she still brought that up, thought that was funny,
I guess because when she looked at whatever it was, she didn't see
anything.

It may have fried because you use it more than others or
maybe that outlet feeds other outlets or things on that circuit and as a
result there is a lot of heat. There could also be loose connections that
finally failed. You didn't mention what you did to trip the circuit
breaker, but by doing that you may have pushed a marginal problem to
failure. It's also possible that the problem may be from another outlet
that feeds this particular outlet.

Take your time. Double check that the power is off at each outlet that you
work on. If you get stuck, post some pictures and give us the link so that
we can properly advise you.